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THE INTERPRETER 



THE 

INTERPRETER 



BY 



WASHINGTON GLADDEN, D.D. 



Author of 

Present-Day Theology," "The Labor Question" "Ultima Veritas 

"Being a Christian," "The Christian Way" "The Practice 

of Immortality," "The School of Life" 




THE PILGRIM PRESS 

BOSTON CHICAGO 



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Copyright 1918 
Bt FRANK M. SHELDON 



4UG -5 1918 



THE PILGRIM PRESS 
BOSTON 



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To 

®fp (Hfltujregaiumal QHjurrfjea 

in whose ministry I have served for fifty-eight years; who 
gave me the right to preach the Gospel; who have given me, 
through all these years, the sympathy and encouragement of 
friendly hearers, and have furnished me, by their faithful 
living, with my strongest reasons for believing that the 
Gospel is true, these pages are affectionately inscribed. 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I The Interpreter 3 

II Worlds in the Making 23 

III The Great Adventure 43 

IV God in the Garden 63 

V Loyalty 81 

VI The Lord God is a Sun 99 

VII The Elixir 115 

VIII A New Heart for the Nation 131 

IX The Value of Fragments 15 1 

X The Joy of the Lord 169 

XI Put First Things First 189 

XII Outdoor Religion 205 

XIII The Call of the Deep 221 

XIV Blessing and Banning 239 

XV The Call of the Kingdom 257 



I 
THE INTERPRETER 



I 
THE INTERPRETER 

" Wherefore, let him that speaketh in a tongue pray 
that he may interpret.^ — / Cor. 1/+ : 13. 

The speaking with tongues, which Paul is here discussing, 
is an obscure matter. The commentators explain it 
variously. The people of Corinth apparently regarded 
it as a remarkable sign of the presence of God in their 
lives — as one of distinguishing gifts of the Spirit. It 
would seem that those supposing themselves to have 
received this gift were proud of it, and wanted to exercise 
it, in season and out of season. Sometimes when these 
possessors of tongues came together they all wanted to 
speak at once, so that there was great disorder. People 
with tongues are sometimes accused of that in these days. 
This was a sure sign, Paul suggests, that it was not the 
Spirit of God who was prompting them; for " God is not 
a God of confusion but of peace, as in all the churches of 
the Saints." 

Precisely what the nature of this gift was is difficult to 
say. Probably it was not any miraculous proficiency in 
the use of a foreign language; it was simply a voluble 
utterance of sounds which had no significance either to the 

3 



THE INTERPRETER 

mind of the speaker or to the ear of the listener, but was 
the spontaneous utterance of a perfervid emotion. The 
feelings were stirred, the nerves were excited and the voice 
poured forth a torrent of vocables. Such phenomena are 
not rare. We have people in our own day who give us 
illustrations of this kind of religion; they claim to speak 
with tongues and to inherit the gifts that the Christians 
at Corinth had. Perhaps they do. I am inclined to be- 
lieve that the Corinthians were under neurotic rather than 
spiritual influence. 

In Nashville, two years ago, I attended a Sunday evening 
service of a sect of very ignorant negroes who are known as 
the Jumpers. They are very religious, and their religious 
experience comes to its climax when members of the con- 
gregation rise to their feet and begin to jump into the air 
frantically, leaping as high as they can, and continuing 
the saltation until they fall down exhausted. They were 
being stirred up to this manifestation by a speaker who 
was in full volley when I entered the room. I think that 
he was probably speaking with tongues. He was orating 
in a high key, with tremendous volubility, his sentences 
often culminating in a shout or a scream; he was gesticulat- 
ing violently; he was rushing back and forth across the 
platform, but I do not think that he was saying anything, 
or thought that he was. Now and then a Scriptural word 
or phrase, or a pious ejaculation, or a Biblical name would 
be mingled with his torrent of vocables, but I am sure that 
no ideas of any description were conveyed by them; no- 

4 



THE INTERPRETER 

body was listening for ideas; the sensibilities of the audience 
were being played upon by the tone of the voice and the 
exhibitions of excited feeling. Presently a woman in 
one of the pews just in front of me sprang up and began 
to jump; she jumped until she was exhausted, and had to 
be laid down in a pew and fanned; the exciting cause had 
produced its natural effect. 

That, I have no doubt, was substantially the same kind 
of phenomenon that Paul was dealing with in Corinth. 
He does not seem to know exactly what he ought to say 
about it; he does not wholly discredit it; he does not deny 
that it may be the operation of the Spirit ; but he evidently 
wishes to make the Corinthians see that it is at best an 
inferior and secondary sign of the Spirit's presence, an 
emotional luxury to be sparingly indulged in. He says 
that the man who speaks with tongues may edify himself, 
but that he edifies nobody else, and that therefore he had 
better wait till he gets home and practise on himself — 
a shrewd counsel; for that is precisely what he is not likely 
to do. He says that prophesying (by which he means 
simply preaching or speaking intelligible words) is far 
more profitable than this rhapsodic elocution; " I had 
rather speak five words with my understanding that I 
might instruct others also, than ten thousand words in 
a tongue." 

It would seem that there were some among the Corin- 
thians who deemed themselves able to interpret these 
tongues — to make sense of these incoherencies. The 

5 



THE INTERPRETER 

subjects of this visitation were not, themselves, ordinarily 
able to give any idea of what they were saying, but some 
of their neighbors thought they could do so. They were 
" interpreters of tongues." They supposed themselves 
able to give some meaning to these emotional outpourings. 
And Paul says that if only some meaning can be given to 
them, they may prove helpful. By all means, therefore, 
he urges, let us have the interpretation. Let us have no 
talking with tongues unless we have the interpretation 
following. And let every man who speaketh in a tongue 
pray that he may interpret. 

The uses of the interpreter are thus brought before our 
minds. The function of interpretation is one of the great 
human functions. The precise kind of interpretation with 
which Paul is dealing is not, indeed, a familiar business. 
To interpret what a man is saying when he himself does 
not know what he is saying is an enterprise to which none 
of us would wish to be called. It is like those tasks of 
interpretation imposed on some of the Old Testament 
worthies, — on Daniel for example, at the court of Nebu- 
chadnezzar. The king had had a dream which greatly 
troubled him; he not only did not know what it meant, but 
he had forgotten the dream itself; and he called all his 
wise men and soothsayers and demanded that they should 
first tell him the dream, and then give him the interpreta- 
tion thereof. Quite like an Eastern satrap; like forcing 
a man to make bricks without either straw or clay. 

I do not suppose that any of us will ever be required to do 

6 



THE INTERPRETER 

any such thing as this. But interpretation of many 
more rational types we shall all be called to practise, and 
I wish to consider with you this function. It is a great 
function, as I have said, and we are all called to its exercise. 
If any of us are in the habit of talking gibberish, we may 
well indeed, as Paul suggests, pray for the power to turn it 
into sense; but it is not only the talkers of gibberish who 
have need to covet this great gift of interpretation, but 
those of us also who suppose that our words have some 
meaning. 

To interpret is to explain, expound, elucidate; to take a 
matter which is more or less obscure and make it intelligible. 
In his book, " The Problem of Christianity,' ' Professor 
Royce gives us an extended and profound discussion of 
this function of interpretation. He claims and seems to 
prove that the clear recognition of it throws much light on 
some of the fundamental psychological problems. I am 
not going into those profundities, but those who have read 
the book will be aware that I have read it, even if I have 
not understood it all. 

For one thing, he suggests to us that the beginning of 
interpretation is in our own minds. The first thing that 
every man needs is to be able to explain himself to himself. 
For, in fact, there are a number of selves with which you 
are always dealing, and you want them to keep in some 
kind of intelligible relation with one another. There is 
your past self, and here is your present self, and yonder is 
your future self; and you want to understand clearly how 

7 



THE INTERPRETER 

that past self came to be this present self, and what will 
have to come to pass if that future self is to be realized. 
A coherent personality involves a good deal of careful self- 
interpretation. The man that you are now can learn 
much wisdom by understanding well the man that you 
used to be, and the man that you mean to be will have to 
reckon with the man that you are now. The great Socratic 
maxim, " Know thyself," requires, of course, a constant 
process of self -interpretation. 

But this is not exactly the business that I want you now 
to consider. What I am thinking of is rather the commerce 
of mind with mind, or of one mind with many minds, — 
the exchanges of thought and feeling by which the good of 
one life is conveyed to another. 

I am not sure that there is not something here which is, 
after all, quite analogous to the work of Paul's interpreters. 
Are there not some among our acquaintances who need 
to be interpreted to themselves; whose ideas about life 
are more or less vague; who hardly know what it is that 
they want; who are full of impulses and visions and dreams 
and longings, but know not how to realize them? May 
there not be some one whom you yourself can recall, to 
whom you feel indebted for a service of this nature; of 
whom you may truly say: " He helped me to understand 
myself; he showed me what my life meant, and put me in 
the way of finding it." 

But the larger work of the interpreter involves, more 
distinctly, a threefold cooperation. There is the inter pre- 

8 



THE INTERPRETER 

ter, and the person or thing to be interpreted, and the mind 
or minds to whom the interpretation is addressed. These 
constitute what Professor Royce calls the Community of 
Interpretation. " If, then," he says, " I am worthy to be 
an interpreter at all, we three, you, my neighbor, whose 
mind I would fain interpret, — you, my kindly listener, to 
whom I am to address my interpretation, — we three 
constitute a community. Let us give to this sort of 
community a technical name. Let us call it a Community 
of Interpretation." 

In various ways we note the articulations of this bond 
by which human beings are united. There comes to your 
door a stranger who knows only the Russian language and 
desires to speak with you, who know only English. You 
confront each other and you are dumb and helpless. 
There is a great gulf betwixt you. But some one within the 
house who knows both languages is summoned; and at once 
the stranger's sentences are made intelligible to you and 
yours to him. The baffled, puzzled look passes from the 
countenances of both of you; you are smiling at each other, 
and nodding your heads in assent and appreciation. The 
Community of Interpretation has been established be- 
tween you, and the interpreter is full sharer of the kindly 
interest of which he is the medium. 

Longfellow sits down in his study with the Divina 
Commedia before him, printed in a language which I 
do not read. Dante has spoken in world-compelling tones, 
but to me they convey no meaning. But the scholar 

9 



THE INTERPRETER 

lovingly turns that Italian epic into English verse and 
passes it on to me. The heart of it is mine; I rejoice and 
give thanks; a great soul has become my comrade. 

These are striking and salient instances of the work of 
the interpreter. But they are only instances of a process 
that is as common as walking and breathing. For inter- 
pretation is the staple of social life. Like Moliere's French- 
man, who had heard much talk from the literary people 
about the beauties of prose and wondered what this inter- 
esting thing might be, and suddenly waked up to the 
delightful realization that he himself had been talking 
prose all his life, — so we are all daily engaged in this great 
work of interpretation. Some of us practise it very 
bunglingly; few of us have any adequate sense of the 
fineness of the art of interpretation when it is brought to 
its perfection; but most of us are practising it, more or less 
successfully, all our lives long. 

The mother is the first and the greatest of interpreters. 
It is hers to explain the world to the baby; to teach him 
the nature of things and the value of symbols and the mean- 
ing of words; to unfold to him, little by little, the facts and 
forces of his environment. As soon as his mind is awake, 
and his curiosity is aroused, and language equips him for 
questioning, the business of interpreting begins to be brisk. 
It is no sinecure. How much there is that needs interpreta- 
tion! How eager and persistent is his quest into the what 
and the why of things! Was there ever a parent so broadly 
and thoroughly educated that he did not wish, before his 

10 



THE INTERPRETER 

first-born was four years old, that he knew a multitude of 
things of which he was wholly ignorant? How delicate 
and difficult, yet how quickening and inspiring is this task 
of interpreting the world and life and truth and duty and 
God to the mind of the child! What a tremendous 
responsibility it is to present the realities of things in 
their right proportion to the expanding and inquiring 
intellect! 

O you fathers and mothers, you kindergartners and 
teachers, in day-schools and Sunday-school, — how many 
of you, I wonder, have ever comprehended the greatness of 
the task committed to you, of interpreting the meaning of 
life to those before whom you stand? Take the four great 
words, which Dr. Cabot gives us as representing the things 
that men live by (I believe that he borrowed them from 
Tolstoy) — Work, Play, Love, Worship, — it is yours to 
unfold, to the minds which turn to you for light, the mean- 
ing of these great words. 

To interpret work, — to make these boys and girls see 
the reason of it, the purpose of it, the value of it, the dig- 
nity and nobility and divineness of it, — the degrada- 
tion of a life of idleness, the shame of a life which 
spends its energies in exploiting others for its own profit 
or pleasure, — what a service that is to the Commonwealth 
and to humanity! 

To interpret play — to understand how deep is the 
impulse which leads to all joyful and beautiful forms of 
self-expression; how sweet and precious are the gains that 

11 



THE INTERPRETER 

are registered in the life in its moments of relaxation; 
and what infinite danger there is of perverting this impulse 
— of suffering it to usurp a dominion over the thought and 
the will that does not belong to it, of permitting play 
which ought to be the minister of health and happiness, to 
be " procuress to the lords of hell"; — how much need 
there is of such mediation as this between the young 
minds that surround you and the present world whose 
lures solicit them and whose slippery paths invite their 
feet! 

To interpret love, — the love that gives life its meaning; 
the love that kindles in the heart a purifying flame; the 
love that makes sacred and divine the elemental impulses; 
that transfigures the flesh; that takes the sting from pain; 
that doubles our joys and divides our sorrows; that brings 
i nto the life of earth all the elements of heaven, — if we 
can only make these young men and women see some- 
thing of its sacredness, its glory, what a world this 
might be! 

To interpret worship, — to open young eyes to the wonder 
and the greatness of the things unseen and eternal, the 
things of the spirit, the nearness and the reality of the 
influences that always surround us, that press upon our 
thought and kindle our emotions, — that wait upon the 
threshold of consciousness with suggestions and promptings ; 
that offer us a Friendship by which the better self may be 
enriched and ennobled, — if we can but convince those who 
give us their confidence that all this is standing close 

12 



THE INTERPRETER 

about them, waiting to find entrance to their lives; that 
inspiration is a fact as simple and homely as fireside talk 
and neighborly fellowship; that it is always easier to find 
God than it is to find your nearest friend; if we can only 
so interpret to them the nearness of this spiritual realm in 
the midst of which we are always living, and the infinite 
resources which are always within the reach of our wishes, — 
then, indeed, the gateways of wisdom and the paths of 
peace will be open to them. 

Other words of great significance hold meanings which 
for multitudes await the touch of the interpreter's wand. 
Citizenship — - how great a word it is, yet to how many is 
its meaning but dimly seen! The throngs that pour into 
our population from other lands, where citizenship is 
hardly more than the shadow of a name, and who speedily 
pass through the formalities by which they are clothed 
with political responsibility and endowed with the functions 
of rulership — how quick and urgent is the call for the 
interpretation to them of the nature of the estate into which 
they have been initiated. It is pathetic, it is ominous, 
it is tragical to watch the hasty incorporation into the 
national life of such multitudes to whom the meaning of 
citizenship is so imperfectly known. To the vast majority 
of them, indeed, language is a barrier ; they cannot read the 
laws which they have sworn to obey and enforce. Good 
men and women are many of these — thrifty, frugal, 
faithful; but how ill-prepared for the great tasks which 
have been imposed upon them, and how much in need that 

13 



THE INTERPRETER 

the great obligations of citizenship should be interpreted 
to them. And how little do we, the intelligent holders of 
the franchise, comprehend this need of theirs and our re- 
sponsibility for supplying it! How little are we doing to 
make these new citizens acquainted with their privileges 
and duties! We have brought them over here, by millions, 
to dig our mines, to build our railroads, to tend our fur- 
naces, but we have given ourselves little concern for the 
preparation of them to be our partners in the government 
of the Commonwealth. Something, indeed, we have 
done. The children are in school, and through them many 
lessons of loyalty are learned by the parents. And it is 
possible, as the teachers of some of our cities are learning, 
to use the machinery of the schools most effectively in 
supplying this want directly to the adults themselves. 
The Bureau of Education and the Bureau of Naturaliza- 
tion are cooperating most wisely in the preparation of 
intending citizens for citizenship, and that work could be 
greatly extended. 

I am far from assuming that the immigrants who speak 
other tongues are the only ones who need to have the mean- 
ing of citizenship interpreted to them. Multitudes who 
speak only English and whose feet have never pressed the 
soil of any other continent than this, have very confused 
ideas respecting the meaning of democracy and the nature 
of the Commonwealth which shelters them. To many of 
them it is little more than a legal enclosure, within which 
are impounded masses of striving and scrambling human 

14 



THE INTERPRETER 

beings, each of whom is seeking to get for himself as much 
as he can, — and to yield to the rest no more than 
he must. 

The object of the Commonwealth, as such men think 
of it, is to provide certain rules of the game of competition, 
and set men free to play the game. Of course the strong 
and the cunning win and the weaker are worsted in the 
game. Of course all sorts of groupings and combinations 
are formed; and some stand together to protect themselves 
against others, or to exploit others; and there are various 
social devices of prudence or of compassion, by which we 
try to restrain the most rapacious and to aid the less for- 
tunate; but so long as this primal conception of society 
as a chartered struggle of interests so largely prevails, we must 
be living in an atmosphere of distrust, and antipathy, and 
strife, and suffering. 

The one thing needful is that we should be freed from 
this primal conception of society as a chartered struggle of 
interests, and get possession of the true idea of society as 
a cooperation of harmonious and common interests, — as a 
Commonwealth, in which the welfare of each is promoted 
by the good will of all. 

We have been steadily moving in this direction in this 
country during the last decade or two ; the idea of coopera- 
tion is getting a foothold in many minds, and our laws 
are shaping themselves more and more to secure this result ; 
but there is still much darkness in men's minds respecting 
this fundamental truth. We are still, most of us, at the 

15 



THE INTERPRETER 

back of our minds, clinging to that old notion of strife as 
the regulative principle of society. But this is just half 
the truth about democracy, and a half truth is always 
a whole falsehood. " Democracy," says Mr. Ferguson, 
" regarded as a balloting contrivance for equating the hoof 
and claw of warring private interests, is an ingenious 
futility. Let it pass now to its place in the museums of 
antiquities along with the devices for the solution of 
impossible mechanical problems, like that of perpetual 
motion." 

The deepest need of the people of the United States is 
to see and know that democracy means brotherhood, 
nothing less, nothing other. Where is the interpreter — 
nay, the call is not for one, but for many; their name must 
be Legion — where are the interpreters who will stand in 
the forum, and the mart, and the nursery, and the school- 
room, and the lecture room, and the pulpit and teach and 
testify and explain the fundamental truth of the Social 
Order, that America means democracy, and that democracy 
means brotherhood. The interpretation to the people of 
the real nature of the Commonwealth which they are 
trying to build upon these shores, that is the one thing 
that good men ought to pray for. 

It must be clear to all of us that this Community of 
Interpretation, of which Professor Royce tells us, includes 
or ought to include us all; that a very large part of the 
business of all our lives ought to be the business of inter- 
pretation. How much we can do, if this is an intelligent 

16 



THE INTERPRETER 

purpose, to help people to understand one another! How 
much of the misery and loss and waste and failure of life 
is caused by misunderstandings! How many do we know 
who are suspecting each other and hating each other and 
thwarting each other because they do not understand 
each other! If some one loving both could interpret each 
to each, how soon their feud would be at an end! 

How much of the ill-will and suspicion of opposing 
classes is due to misunderstanding! If Catholics could be 
fully explained to Protestants and Protestants to Catho- 
lics, how much of the rancor and bitterness that now divide 
them would pass away! 

Even between employers and employed there is often 
great need of interpretation; the motives and purposes of 
each are greatly misconceived by the other. 

I am aware that there are often differences of purpose, 
antagonisms of will, which remain after all misunderstand- 
ings are removed, and which need some other adjustment 
than that which the interpreter can bring; but I am speak- 
ing now of those which do arise from misconceptions and 
which disappear as soon as each understands the other; 
and these are the causes of a very large part of the trouble 
of life. How beautiful and blessed in all this realm is 
the reconciling work of the interpreter! 

But not only do people need to be explained to each 
other; all of us are in constant need of having truth and 
life and duty interpreted to us. We can all help one an- 
other; I talk with no one who does not give me light; 

17 

\ 



THE INTERPRETER 

some rays of illumination always shine from the conversa- 
tion of the unlearned and the questionings of little children. 
We are not always so grateful as we ought to be to those 
who thus bring light into our lives, and we often accept 
the good and use it, and wholly forget the giver; but there 
are few of us who do not sometimes gratefully record such 
help, — instances in which some tangled web was unravelled, 
some constructive idea was cleared, some vital truth was 
driven home. Such experiences are memorable: 

" For what delights can equal those 
Which stir the spirit's inner deeps, 
When one who loves, but knows not, reaps 
A truth from one who loves and knows! " 

And it may be that we can also recall some occasions 
when the joy of the interpreter has been ours; when it has 
been our privilege to share with those who are dear to us 
some truth which we knew gave them succor and hope. 
Which of these experiences is the richer, I cannot tell. 
The maxim that it is more blessed to give than to receive 
applies only to material things; when we rise into the 
realms of the spirit there is no difference; it is just as 
blessed to receive love as it is to give it. 

Let us be glad today for all the work that has been done 
for us by all the interpreters; by those who watched us in 
our cradles, by those who have led us in high paths of 
thought, by those who have walked with us in the dusty 
ways of our pilgrimage. 

And let us be grateful, too, for this high calling of the 

18 



THE INTERPRETER 

interpreter to which every one of us is called, and let us 
pray for the knowledge and the wisdom and the courage and 
the gentleness by which we may be fitted to discharge its 
great responsibilities and to render its grateful and inspiring 
services! 



19 



II 
WORLDS IN THE MAKING 



II 
WORLDS IN THE MAKING^ 

Jesus answered them, My Father worketh even until now, 
and I work. — John 5 : 17. 

Jesus had been performing a notable work of healing, 
and the pious people were cavilling because it was done on 
the Sabbath day. He answers, as he is apt to do, by- 
referring to the Father. His Father's rule of life is his 
rule. " My Father is always at work," he says, " and so 
ami." 

The notion of his critics evidently was that the divine 
activity ceased at intervals; that the Creator allowed 
himself periods of absolute repose. That was the purport 
of the Creation story, and Jesus appears to substitute a 
larger meaning. " My Father worketh hitherto — even 
until now," he says. " Up to date he has been continu- 
ously at work; if his children follow his example they 
cannot go astray." He might, for that matter, have added 
"He is always resting, too; for with the unwearied energies 
of perfect love, labor is rest." 

The truth which Jesus seeks to bring home to the carpers 
is simply this, that God is never too weary to minister to 
human needs; that his compassion and his care take no 
vacations; that " he who watcheth over Israel slumbers 
not nor sleeps "; and that those who have his spirit will 

23 



THE INTERPRETER 

find no day too sacred to do a kind deed, and nothing so 
good that it cannot be made better. 

The great truth of the unwearied energy of the divine life 
could hardly have been grasped, in all its fulness, by the 
people to whom Jesus was speaking. To us it should be 
much more easily intelligible. That God has always been 
at work is a proposition which we can more readily enter- 
tain. If all natural forces are the manifestation of his 
power it is impossible to conceive that he ever stops working. 

If gravitation should suspend operation for a night; if 
the stars and the planets should pause in their courses; 
if the sun should withdraw its supplies of light and heat; 
if chemical reactions should be interrupted, what would 
become of us? Such a catastrophe could hardly have 
suggested itself to the people who were trying to quarrel 
with Jesus, but it cannot be absent from our minds. 

Even we, however, may sometimes fail to grasp all the 
implications of this truth of the continuous and unwearied 
activity of the Creator in the Creation. The immanence 
of God has, indeed, become a more or less familiar concep- 
tion to many of us, but it is a truth too large to be readily 
assimilated. That the Lord and Giver of life has been at 
work in this world and in all the worlds, through all the 
aeons, even until now, and now as intimately and creatively 
as ever, is a truth which is not probably quite familiar to 
all of us. 

The common conception is that God's work, in nature, say, 
is divided into two separate functions — that of creation 

24 



WORLDS IN THE MAKING 

and that of preservation. The work of creation was all 
done at once, and it was done a long time ago. Just 
how long has been a matter of dispute; the margins of the 
old Bible used to put the date of the creation at 4004 
B.C.; that was Usher's chronology, and we still hear 
preaching which insists that this chronology is infallibly 
inspired, and that all who question it are infidels. Ac- 
cording to this theory this world and the entire universe 
were created in six days. Some have contended that the 
day is an age, an epoch of time, longer or shorter; but 
whatever the length of the period, it is supposed that the 
last of the six periods was concluded a good while ago; 
that the work of the Creator was finished then, and that 
since that time nothing has been added to the creation. 

This explanation was entirely adequate in the childhood 
of the world, but it does not accord with our present 
knowledge. We must try to find a statement which will 
better represent the facts of observation and experience. 
The belief that the infinite Wisdom and the infinite Love 
have been finding expression, in all the ages, and are now 
finding expression continually in new forms of life and 
being, has, at least, a high degree of probability. It agrees 
with the facts which we know. - 

If we are looking for Scriptural authority the statement 
of Jesus in the text expressly authorizes such a belief. 
Other texts convey the same meaning. " He that sitteth 
on the throne saith 'Behold, I make — I am making — all 
things new. ' " It is mentioned as if it were his occupa- 

25 



THE INTERPRETER 

tion: God's work is continual re-creation. Texts are in- 
adequate testimony, however; for our assurance concern- 
ing these deepest things we must go down to our elemental 
conception about God. We must make our statements 
agree as well as we can with the larger revelations which 
God has been giving us through the centuries. 

If the Creator is infinite both in power and in love, it is 
difficult for us to conceive of Him as ceasing from creative 
activity. We are ready to assent when we hear the prophet 
crying: " Hast thou not known, hast thou not heard, the 
everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the 
earth fainteth not, neither is weary." If that prophet had 
known all we know about the heavens, the work of God's 
hands, the moon and the stars which he has ordained, 
he would have found some far greater reason for wonder 
at the unwearied energy of the Creator's work. It is 
when our thoughts go out into those inconceivable spaces 
which science has mapped for us, and when the telescope 
and the spectroscope and the camera unfold for us their 
mighty secrets, that we get some glimpses of the truth which 
is so far beyond our comprehension. From everlasting to 
everlasting this work of peopling space with suns and sys- 
tems, with planets and satellites has been going forward; 
and sprinkled through all those stellar spaces are thousands 
of nebulae — little blurs of star dust, — which seem to be 
condensing now into suns and planets. 

The process is quite too deliberate for our science to 
witness and chronicle and record its stages; it may take 

26 



WORLDS IN THE MAKING 

several millions of years for these mists to harden into 
masses, and there has been no sufficient time since men 
began to take their observations for any appreciable 
changes to be observed; but there is every reason to be- 
lieve that the work is forever going on; and that even now 
there are thousands of suns more brilliant than ours, and 
tens of thousands of worlds more vast than our own, in 
process of creation. 

Worlds in the making, — the telescope shows them to us, 
far, far away, in the purlieus of space, at distances so great 
that our imagination fails when we try to conceive them. 
There is room enough in infinite space for infinite power to 
fill with the works of his hands; and about such work as 
this he who fainteth not, neither is weary, seems to be 
occupied through the eternal years. 

And it is not at all certain that any one of these millions 
of worlds is finished yet, or ever will be. In every one of 
them the Creator is forever making all things new. That, 
at any rate, is the probability, if we may judge by what is 
taking place here. How many myriads of years our world 
has been in the making, nobody knows. Take your pad 
and pencil and sit down on some plateau which overlooks 
the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, and figure out the 
length of time it has taken that river to do the carving which 
is spread before your eyes. When that sum is done proceed 
to reckon up the years that it took before that carving was 
begun, for those rocks to gather into strata at the bottom 
of primeval oceans and build themselves up to the level 

27 



THE INTERPRETER 

where you sit. Through all these myriads of ages, the 
Power not ourselves, whose reason gives the law to all 
these processes, has been building these mountain walls 
and channeling these canyons, and tracing these river 
courses and spreading out these valleys and these prairies, 
and clothing the hillsides with these forests, and peopling 
earth and ocean with manifold tribes of living creatures. 

How long this world has been in the making no man 
knows. Lord Kelvin conceded that it might be a million 
years. Infinite wisdom and infinite power have been at 
work upon it from that dateless dawn when the morning 
stars began to sing together because a new planet had 
swum into their ken. Mighty and multitudinous are the 
forces which have been working together through all this 
period to fit this earth for a human habitation. Is the work 
finished? Oh, no,, far from it. How much is yet to be 
done! How far the creation is from perfection! Doubt- 
less, God looks on it every day, and says that it is good ; but 
good can be made better, and this is his eternal task, and 
he was never more busy upon it than he is today. 

The secular forces of Nature which are only the out- 
goings of his power and love are certainly as active today 
as ever they were. Our Father worketh hitherto, — he 
has been working even until now, to make a better world 
of this, for a home for his children. Those who conceive 
that he finished this work of Creation six thousand years 
ago have a childish notion of the relation of God to his 
world. 

28 



WORLDS IN THE MAKING 

This great new term of Bergson's — " Creative Evolu- 
tion " — may help us get a little nearer to the heart of 
the matter. That evolution is in its essence creative, 
and that creation is in its essence evolutionary, is the 
unifying truth which resolves the contradiction over which 
men were stumbling fifty years ago. 

Science, finding in the laws of matter and motion certain 
uniformities, has sometimes been swift to conclude with 
the ancient pessimist that the thing which has been is 
the thing that shall be and that there is and can be 
nothing new under the sun. " It is of this false inference," 
says Professor Tufts, " that Bergson's doctrine offers a 
corrective. Life, human or cosmic, may be conveniently 
measured for many purposes in terms of atoms, of electrons 
of energy, but these measurements, so necessary for esti- 
mating the future, for observing its continuity, are yet 
not adequate to tell the full story. Especially are they not 
adequate to measure mind itself, which uses them to 
measure the world. Life, as we experience it, in the 
immediate on-go of the feeling and thought is not chopped 
up into pieces; it is a whole. Nor is it a repetition of 
past units. Every moment is a new. Evolution is through 
and through creative. Variation is a fact as important as 
continuity, and variation means a something new." 

Of course, God is in his world. He has always been here. 
And he is always at work here. Therefore it ought to be a 
different world, and a better world than it was a thousand 
years ago, or a hundred years ago, — a better world today 

29 



THE INTERPRETER 

than it was yesterday. It ought to be and it is. But it is 
not finished yet — how far from it! Even on the physical 
side there is much to do. Vast areas are wild and bar- 
ren; there are deserts to fertilize and jungles to sub- 
due, and swamps to drain, and products now wasted 
to utilize; there is endless work yet to be done before 
the creation can be completed, and our Father is always 
at work. 

What is true of the physical world is not less true of the 
human world. Humanity, not less really than the planet 
on which it dwells, is still in the making. It is not any 
more true of man than of the universe, that he was made 
and finished and set upon the earth a completed product 
six thousand years ago. That, too, is a childish notion. 
That man, in his essential manhood, was struck off, like a 
coin from a die, is a conception quite impossible to those 
who are familiar with the processes of life as they are al- 
ways unfolding before our eyes. 

The making of man is not such a simple mechanical 
process as the old creation legends picture it. Swinburne's 
lyric with that title is disfigured by Swinburne's pessi- 
mism ; but its imaginative value is not to be denied : — 

" Before the beginning of years 

There came to the making of man 

Time with a gift of tears; 
Grief with a glass that ran; 

Pleasure with pain for leaven, 
Summer with flowers that fell, 

30 



WORLDS IN THE MAKING 

Remembrance fallen from heaven 

And madness risen from hell; 
Strength without hands to smite, 

Love that endures for a breath, 
Night the shadow of light, 

And life, the shadow of death. 

" And the high gods took in hand 

Fire and the falling of tears, 
And a measure of sliding sand 

From under the feet of the years; 
And froth and drift of the sea, 

And dust of the laboring earth, 
And bodies of things to be 

In the houses of death and of birth; 
And wrought with weeping and laughter, 

And fashioned with loathing and love, 
With life, before and after, 

And death, beneath and above, 
For a day and a night and a morrow, 

That his strength might endure for a span, 
With travail and heavy sorrow 

The holy spirit of man." 

These antitheses are largely the fruit of a mental habit, 
and of a somber temperament, but they do give us a 
glimpse of the way in which the elements have been mingled 
in the making of man. And without any resort to imagina- 
tion, we know from the records of archaeology and of his- 
tory that the human being as he exists upon the earth 
today, is the product of creative forces which have been 
acting upon him for hundreds of thousands of years. 

Did you see the series of ten models made by a Belgian 
sculptor, which were on exhibition in the San Diego exposi- 
tion, tracing the descent from the Java man of a million 

31 



THE INTERPRETER 

years ago to the man of the European forests of twenty 
thousand years ago? " These models," we are told, "are 
constituted from the actual skeletal remains, and the 
decorations and implements are exact reproductions of 
those found with the bones.' ' Thus science uncovers for us 
the age-long process by which God has been making man. 
When the human race arrived upon this planet it was 
in a very crude condition. But for ages upon ages the 
infinite love had been preparing the earth for the coming of 
man, and man found himself enveloped by influences that 
tended to awaken and nurture his true humanity. " The 
present " says Mr. Shumaker, " is a stage in a process and 
a part of a universal ongoing." And this is just as true of 
every year of the past millenniums as it is true of this 
year. " So that man is held " (and has always been held) 
" within an onmoving process, as a drop of water is held 
within the onmoving river. Whether the general scientific 
statement of evolution shall undergo Hmitations or not, 
there can be no sort of question that we and all things are 
involved in a process of development. The present 
century is not a mere mechanical repetition of the past. 
Something gets done. Something new is begun, something 
old passes away. There is an ongoing. . . . There is a 
world-process, unfolding and unfolding with the passing 
centuries. From fire-mist to earth-crust, to Athens, to 
London, is an altogether wonderful progression. And all 
humankind forms part of the process and is swept onward 
with it. . . . To be a part of a universal process, to embody 

32 



WORLDS IN THE MAKING 

that process and utter its progression in ourselves, is to 
involve an infinitude of touches and commerces which 
only a universal mind could compass." 

And this is what creation means so far as man is con- 
cerned. This is the way in which the universal mind has 
been making man. " Our Father worketh hitherto." 
This is a glimpse of his great working. He is filling the 
infinite spaces with new worlds in which his love is to find 
manifestation. He is getting this world ready, through 
endless ages, for the home of man. " The new-born babe," 
says Mr. Shumaker, " is born into a home and a universe 
already prepared for it. From the first it opens its lungs 
to an atmosphere already awaiting it, and its eyes upon a 
world of waiting light. From the first its ears are greeted 
by the love notes of parents, while the voices of children 
and men and all the sounds of environing nature seek to 
awake its slumbering faculty. The upholding earth is 
there as another mother-bosom of support. The far-off 
anticipating sun has hasted with the speed of light to warm 
the welcoming earth, and already, with hands softer and 
gentler than mother's, holds the babe in its strong embrace. 
. . . The child is born, indeed, into a universe already 
prepared. The home is there to harbor it; humanity to 
help it; language to teach it; tradition to lead it; law to 
govern it; the school to educate it; the church to consecrate 
and nurture it; play and work there to develop it; truth 
to enlighten it; ideals to exalt and idealize it; art and 
beauty to symmetrize and refine it; the Son of God there 

33 



THE INTERPRETER 

to save and shepherd it, and the divine spirit to hallow, 
spiritualize and fulfil it. . . . The child is born into a 
prepared universe. If a man stepped down from a star 
he would not find the earth more ready for his footstep 
than the babe finds all things made ready for his coming. 
Our infinite total environment is in readiness against the 
day of our birth." 1 

Such work as this it is that our Father is always doing. 
When he said, " Let us make man," this was what he 
meant. By such ministrations of infinite wisdom, and in- 
finite forethought, and infinite care, he would make ready 
man's dwelling-place and lead him into the life that is life 
indeed. 

Great work is all this, assuredly. What a marvellous 
universe it is! The greatness of his power, the might of 
his majesty, the wonders of his love, who can comprehend? 
What conceptions are these, upon which we have been 
looking, into which science conducts us, of the eternal God! 
Compared with this universe which astronomy spreads 
above us, and geology uncovers beneath our feet, the 
heavens and the earth of which our fathers had knowledge 
were but a toy universe. Are there no reasons for reverence 
and silence and humility when we stand in the presence of 
realities like these? 

But the great, sublime, arresting thought to which our 
study has led us, is that all this work of our Father is un- 

i" God and Man," by E. Ellsworth Shumaker. The readers of this volume will 
find many quotations from this book, to whose interpretation of nature and of life 
the author is deeply indebted. 

34 



WORLDS IN THE MAKING 

finished work. " My Father worketh even until now," 
said Jesus. If he had always been at work and was 
still at work, that was proof that his work was unfin- 
ished. Is it not true that God's work must always be 
unfinished? Is not that true of all highest and finest kinds 
of work? 

The housekeeper's work, we say, rather humorously, is 
always unfinished. She always hopes that it is unfinished; 
she wishes that it might never be finished. Work, the 
heart of which is love — does any one want to see it finished? 
" Give it the glory of going on." 

The artist's work — does he wish to finish it? He doesn't 
like to think of that. He would be glad if the power of 
giving birth to beauty would never fail. It is true, I say, 
of all the highest kinds of work. So when we consider the 
kind of work about which we know that the infinite love 
has always been busy, we rejoice to know that it is not 
finished and never will be. 

One admonitory hint comes to us with this reflection. 
Some of us have learned, in other fields, the folly and 
impertinence of criticizing unfinished work. And yet we 
sometimes venture to question the work that God is doing. 
It would be well if we would learn to apply our maxim 
to these greater affairs. 

Another consideration is worth mentioning. If the world 
and man have long been and are still in the making, then 
it is clear that man's thought about the world and about 
God and man must have been much more imperfect a 

35 



THE INTERPRETER 

thousand years ago or two thousand years ago than it is 
today. The world itself has changed, must have changed, 
for the better, if God has been working upon it for the 
past thousand years; and if " the thoughts of men are 
widened with the process of the suns," man's interpreta- 
tion of this present world ought to be truer now than 
his interpretation of it could have been a millennium ago. 
It cannot, then, be rational to insist that all our thoughts 
about God and the world and man must be expressed in 
forms of words which were current a thousand years ago. 
Theology which does not keep up with the Creation is 
surely a back number. 

My Father is always at work, said Jesus, and I work. 
The meaning seems to be, "I am working with him. I 
am helping him. I am doing the same kind of work." 
Paul said the same thing: " We are co-workers with God." 
What does this mean ? asks Professor Tufts. " It was 
the merit of (William) James to sound one note clearly: 
The universe is not complete, but is in the making." You 
and I are sometimes called on for decisions which may 
contribute to turn the scale for good or evil. Decision is 
not an empty form; it is real and serious. In such cases 
truth is made, and not merely discovered. It may be then 
that the triumph of right is not a matter of yes or no, but, 
as in all past history, a relative process. " Who knows," 
asks William James, " whether the faithfulness of in- 
dividuals, here below, . . . may not aid God in turn to be 
more effectively faithful to his own greater tasks? " 

36 



WORLDS IN THE MAKING 

The world, the physical world, the human world, is not 
finished; it is in the making. And God is not making it 
alone; he has taken us into partnership. He has made its 
progress depend on us as well as on himself. He has 
put it beyond his own power to make a man without that 
man's own cooperation. That is one thing that omnipo- 
tence cannot do. Equally certain is it that the making of 
the world waits and must wait for the cooperation of those 
who inhabit the world. He who fainteth not, neither is 
weary, has put within our reach the resources by which we 
may help him to make a better world of this; power stored 
in soils and forests and mines and streams and sunbeams; 
currents of subtle and nimble force waiting in the air to 
drive our machines and run upon our errands; and he is 
forever calling to the children of men and saying: Here is 
a world to be made fruitful and beautiful; come and let 
us work together; it would be worth nothing to you if 
all this work were done for you; but, working together 
with me, you can make it fit for the dwelling-place of the 
children of God, and at the same time and in the same 
process make yourselves fit to live in such a world. 

And we are learning, slowly, to work with him; it is a 
vastly better world to live in than it was a thousand years 
ago; human art and skill and industry and love have 
wrought wonders; men like Edison and Tesla and Bur- 
bank are great helpers; the humblest housewife who trains 
her roses over the garden gate does her part. As the 
generations pass, our Father who is always at work and 

37 



THE INTERPRETER 

we his children, working with him, may make this a habita- 
tion worthy of a perfected race. It will never be finished, 
but it will be vastly improved. 

And the world of men — humanity — how far that is 
from being finished. The humanization of the brute — 
that is the work upon which the infinite Goodness has been 
employed for all these centuries. And the work has gone 
far. Since the days of the cave-dwellers, since the days of 
the cannibals, since the days of the Semitic and Druidic 
human sacrifices, since the days when patriarchs swindled 
their brothers out of their birthrights, and when the most 
erudite Greeks and Romans saw nothing reprehensible in 
infanticide, there has been a mighty change for the better 
in mankind. Our Father who is always at work in the 
transformation of crude humanity has not been laboring 
in vain. Sometimes, as now, in a war which degrades and 
disfigures humanity, we see ghastly reversions to the ape 
and tiger type, but he who fainteth not, neither is weary, 
will not fail nor be discouraged until he has delivered 
humanity from its bondage to the brute inheritance into 
the liberty of the glory of the sons of God. 

Humanity is still in the making and by the very terms 
of the covenant which the Eternal Love has imposed on 
himself, the progress of the work must wait upon the will of 
man. It cannot be carried forward without our aid. 
Working together with God, we may bring in the King- 
dom. Without us it cannot be brought in. " The Melio- 
ristic Universe, " says Mr. James, "is conceived after a social 

38 



WORLDS IN THE MAKING 

analogy as a pluralism of independent powers. It will 
succeed just in proportion as more of these work for its 
success. If none work it will fail. If each does his best 
it will not fail." 

This is the meaning of life for us men, here in God's 
world. He is doing all that infinite love can do to fill the 
world with righteousness and peace. The one thing that 
infinite Love cannot do is to take away from men the 
chance to be men. That he would do if he solved their 
problems or bore their burdens for them. This world 
will be Paradise as soon as men want Paradise enough to 
pay the price of it in labor and patience. God is always 
doing his part, but he will never do ours; the fullness of 
the triumph waits upon our human wills. Our hope is in 
the infinite patience of him who has held us steadily to 
our task through so many ages of doubt and folly and sin, 
and has brought us now to the height from which we can 
see something of the way by which we have come, and 
catch some glimpses of the glory yet to be revealed. 

Worlds in the making! Races in the making! Nations, 
states, communities in the making! Men in the making! 
Our Father who has been working hitherto is as busy as 
ever today upon this work. Some of us know how far 
it is from being finished. But it is a great joy and a great 
honor and a great inspiration that we may have some 
knowledge of what he is doing and some part with him in 
his work. 



39 



Ill 
THE GREAT ADVENTURE 



Ill 
THE GREAT ADVENTURE 

By faith Abraham, when he was called, obeyed to go out unto a place 
which he was to receive for an inheritance; and he went out, not knowing 
whither he went. — Heb. 11 : 8. 

This is one of the first of the westward migrations. The 
star of Empire is on its march. With his father, Terah, 
Abram had started, some months earlier, from Ur of the 
Chaldees for the land of Canaan; but Terah had halted 
with his caravan in Haran, and had found his grave there; 
and now the orders had come to his son to resume the march. 
Abram was seventy-five years young, just in his prime; and 
the fact that the new inheritance was a thousand miles 
away did not daunt him. 

" And Abram took Sarai his wife, and Lot his brother's 
son, and all the substance that they had gathered, and all 
the souls that they had gotten in Haran, and they went 
forth to go into the land of Canaan, and into the land of 
Canaan they came." 

Just why this migration was ordered we are not informed. 
The commentators indulge in many speculations about it; 
how close to the facts their conjectures come I cannot 
always be sure. It has been commonly suggested that the 
region whence Abram started was infested with polythe- 

43 



THE INTERPRETER 

ism; but it is not clear that he would improve his situation 
in that respect by taking up his abode among the Semitic 
tribes of Canaan. Indeed, the advocates of Biblical 
inerrancy always justify the extermination of the Canaan- 
ites on the ground that they had become so morally de- 
graded and so horribly irreligious that it was necessary to 
wipe them out of existence. It does not seem probable, 
then, that Abram could have been sent down there to keep 
him out of bad company. Indeed, I incline to believe that 
the strongest temptation to which he was ever subjected — 
the temptation to slay his son — was the consequence of 
his living in this land where human sacrifices were com- 
mon. From that temptation he was mercifully delivered; 
and it would seem that his example was influential in 
restraining his descendants from that awful superstition. 
So far as the record goes the Hebrews never afterward 
fell into that heathenism except in the case of Jephthah, 
in the dark ages of their history. 

We may assume, I think, that He " who shapes our 
ends, rough-hew them how we will," had some good reason 
for guiding Abram to this land of Canaan. What that 
reason was Abram himself did not know. He did not even 
know whither he was going. The impulse came to move 
on, and he moved on. It was a divine impulse, so he 
believed, and he responded to it. This was characteristic 
of the man. " Abraham believed God," Paul says, 
" and it was counted unto him for righteousness." 

Just what Abram's faith was we may not certainly 

44 






THE GREAT ADVENTURE 

know. He is often credited with being the first monothe- 
ist, but I am not sure of that. He might have been and 
probably was a henotheist — a believer in, and a worshipper 
and servant of, one God; but not a denier of the existence of 
other gods, 

Polytheists, like the ancient Chaldeans and the Greeks, 
who have gods many and lords many, to all of whom they 
endeavor to be loyal, are apt to have trouble; for their gods 
are always in politics, and it is often extremely difficult 
for the humans to know how to manage their conflicting 
loyalties. 

The henotheist escapes some of these embarrassments 
by choosing out of the pantheon one god, and maintaining 
his loyalty to him. He does not deny that other peoples 
may have their gods, but he adheres to his own god and of 
course he believes that his god is the greatest of the gods, 
and able to protect him against all other powers, celestial 
or infernal. 

The monotheist, properly speaking, is one who believes 
that there is only one God, one supreme deity, the Creator 
and ruler of all the nations and all the worlds. The later 
Hebrew prophets advanced to this higher stage of monothe- 
istic belief; but the earlier Hebrews, beyond a question, 
were henotheists; they were worshippers of one God; 
Jehovah, or Yahveh, was their God, and they meant to 
be loyal to him; but now and then, when the crops were 
poor and times were hard, they ran away after other gods — 
Baal and Asherah and Moloch and the star of the God 

45 



THE INTERPRETER 

Rephan; and had to be punished for their disloyalty. 
At the same time they recognized the right of every other 
nation to have a god of its own, only maintaining in their 
best moments that Jehovah, their God, was the great 
God, and that in the fullness of the times all the other 
deities would be subservient to him. 

This henotheistic faith is by no means obsolete; up to 
date it has been the prevailing faith of the human race. 
Most of the European nations at the present time — in 
fact all warring nations at all times, are not monotheists, 
but henotheists. Each nation at war has a god of its 
own, and is relying on its god to assist it in killing the 
people of the other nations and dethroning their god. 
Not many of them state it in this way, but this is the actual 
fact. This is the precise meaning of war; it cannot, by 
any stretch of logical reasoning, be adjusted to a monotheis- 
tic faith. Whenever nations go to war, or begin to get 
ready for war, if they have ever been monotheists, they 
drop at once from a monotheistic to a henotheistic faith; 
and they find their inspiration in the first half of the Old 
Testament. 

This henotheistic religion has developed many virtues; 
great loyalties have been nurtured at its altars; men like 
Abraham and Moses and Samuel and David have been 
trained under it; but a better day came to the Hebrews, 
when men like Isaiah and Hosea and the writer of the Book 
of Jonah, and the great nameless prophets of the Exile 
thought that they had found a better faith — a faith in 

46. 



THE GREAT ADVENTURE 

one God, the universal Father, the Father of all nations 
and tribes and peoples; and it was this truth that Jesus 
came to incarnate and reveal. How dimly this truth has 
been discerned even by those who have named his name, 
nineteen centuries of history make plain. 

Sometimes it has seemed as though the nations were 
beginning to grasp the truth of the universal Fatherhood, 
but they are wont to lapse into their ethnic ways and re- 
build the barriers that keep the peoples apart. Just now 
we are witnessing the most desperate attempt that has 
ever been made to nullify and make void the fundamental 
fact of our humanity and the central truth of Christianity; 
our hope has been that this attempt must fail, because of 
its very enormity; and that in the reaction it would destroy 
itself, so that the world might go forward to the larger faith 
for which the whole creation has been waiting and toward 
which it has been moving now these many centuries. 
For while the henotheistic religions might have served 
humanity very well when the nations were small and 
scattered and had no common interests, in these days, 
when they are so large and so close together and so vitally 
interdependent in all their interests, this attempt of each 
to be a law unto itself, and to have its own god and its 
own exclusive interests and loyalties, is not only suicidal, 
it is criminal. There is no crime in the whole catalogue of 
malefactions more deadly, more damnable, than that of 
the human ruler who plants himself on the proposition 
that his state is exempt from all obligation to other states 

47 



THE INTERPRETER 

and that it is his highest duty to increase its power — at 
their expense. 

That is what henotheism means and must mean in these 
days, and instead of being a religion it is the quintessence 
of irreligion. In Abram's day it may well have been the 
faith of a good man. Abraham undoubtedly believed that 
Jehovah was the God of his people. There is a narrative 
in Genesis of a very solemn sacrificial covenant in which 
Jehovah pledged himself to Abraham that he should be a 
father of many nations — " And I will be a God unto thee 
and to thy seed after thee. And I will give to thee and to 
thy seed after thee the land of thy sojournings, all the land 
of Canaan, for an everlasting possession, and I will be thy 
God." No such promise as that so far as the Old Testa- 
ment tells us was made to the people of Egypt or of Syria 
or of Chaldea. Jehovah was Abraham's God. He had 
no conception of any universal Fatherhood. He was loyal 
to his own God. 

This was, I suppose, substantially the faith of Abraham; 
only with Abraham it was not as it was in after years with 
many of his descendants a wavering and inconstant faith; 
it was a steadfast and unfaltering faith. " Abraham 
believed God." There was no questioning about it; as the 
Psalmist said, " his heart was fixed." 

We must judge Abraham by the standards of his own 
times; if we judge him by the ethical standards of the 
twentieth century we shall find him in many ways defec- 
tive. He could lie, on occasion, and not blush or stammer; 

48 



THE GREAT ADVENTURE 

but that was quite the custom of the country; all these old 
patriarchs had confused notions about truthfulness. 
Professor Briggs once told me that a careful study of the 
ancient Hebrew literature had convinced him that in the 
earlier periods there was no sense of the sin of falsehood; 
in their ethical development they had not reached the 
plane on which un veracity is immoral. The fact that 
Abraham sometimes told lies is not, therefore, necessarily 
to be reckoned as a fault with him, any more than the fact 
that he held slaves or was the husband of more than one 
wife. For all such deviations from modern standards of 
ethics we must make the necessary allowances. Abraham 
was not a saint according to our standards, and what Dr. 
Leonard Bacon said about him a good many years ago is 
perfectly true; if he were living in Connecticut or Ohio 
today we should send him to the penitentiary; and yet 
that does not alter the fact that he was a great, loyal, 
magnanimous, high-souled man; fit to be the founder of a 
great nation; worthy of our loving admiration. How 
generously he deals with all the natives of that land; how 
high-minded is his treatment of his rather vagarious nephew 
Lot; how noble is his plea to Jehovah for mercy for the fated 
cities of the plain, when their destruction is decreed. " Wilt 
thou consume the righteous with the wicked? " he remon- 
strates with Jehovah. Some clear sense of the real nature 
of justice — some strong conviction of the wrong that is 
done when the innocent are made to suffer for the sins of 
the guilty, is getting possession of this just mind. " Shall 

49 



THE INTERPRETER 

not the Judge of all the Earth do right? " he demands of 
the majesty of Heaven. And the majesty of Heaven does 
not disallow the plea; he admits that this good man has a 
right to make it. 

Nobody else in that old time, so far as I can discover, 
ever had any such faith in God as that — ever reached 
so high an ideal of the divine justice. It is wonderful that 
any one in those old days ever should have risen to this 
ethical elevation. Justice in those times ordinarily meant 
the determination of a ruler, human or divine, to have his 
own way; to deal with his subjects in masses; to enforce 
his will arbitrarily, and permit no questioning of his de- 
crees. But Abraham clearly perceived that even between 
man and God there were relations of reciprocity, and that 
man has a right to say of God, — 

" Nothing can be good in him 
That evil is in me." 

It was a great discovery, a great insight, for a man living 
in that dark day. And it helps me to understand why it 
was that Abraham was the friend of God and why, when he 
was called, he went out, not knowing whither he went. He 
believed in God. He was sure that the Judge of all the 
Earth would do right; he knew, therefore, that the place to 
which God was sending him was the right place to go. 

This was Abraham's great adventure; God had come to 
him, in some way that we know not, — perhaps by a strong 
impression made upon his mind, — and had said to him, 

50 



THE GREAT ADVENTURE 

" Get thee out of thy land and from thy kindred and come 
into the land which I shall show thee "; and Abraham had 
arisen and gone forth, to find his home in a distant country, 
a country all unknown to him. 

But why, some of you want to know, should we call this 
a great adventure? There have always been risks in the 
great migrations, but there have always been men who were 
ready to take them; and they have not always had what 
Abraham had, the clear command of their God to set forth, 
and the positive assurance that God was going with them. 
"Almost any of us," you say, " would be ready to take such 
a risk with such a guarantee, and such an escort. In fact 
there doesn't seem to be much risk about it. If God should 
tell me to pack up and start for Yucatan — and that he 
was going with me — if I absolutely knew that God was 
telling me that, — I guess I'd go; and I wouldn't stand on the 
order of my going. What man would be such a fool as ob- 
stinately to refuse to obey what he knew to be an explicit 
command of Almighty God? The great adventure that I 
would not risk would be the adventure of turning down the 
explicit and indubitable orders of Almighty God." 

Well, I admit that there is something in what you say. 
I do not believe, either, that any man who was made sure 
that Almighty God had definitely told him to do a certain 
thing would be likely to refuse to do it. And I do not think 
that any man would be entitled to much credit for promptly 
obeying, in such a case. As Browning says, such a relation 
between the Omnipotent and his human creature would 

51 



THE INTERPRETER 

practically annihilate human freedom; if there were no 
room for doubt about the divine command there could be no 
question about obedience and no chance for virtue : — 

" Thenceforth neither good nor evil does man, doing what he must." 

Which makes me wonder whether the communications 
between God and men in such cases could have been quite 
so explicit and unmistakable as these Old Testament narra- 
tives make them seem to be. Haven't we here some ori- 
ental mysticisms, in which spiritual facts are set forth in 
concrete terms? When we read that God appeared to 
Abraham, and that God called to Adam, and that God 
spake to Jacob, is it necessary to suppose that there was a 
visible figure or an audible voice? Or was it a mental im- 
pression that came to each of them? Haven't we an ob- 
jective representation of a subjective fact? I am not 
suggesting the doubt, I am strongly affirming the prob- 
ability that there were real communications in those days, 
as there are in these, between the Father of spirits and the 
spirits of his children; I am only wondering whether the 
communications in those days were not really about 
the same as in these, only the ways of describing them are 
different. 

I am sure that God knows how to convey suggestions to 
us, and that he is constantly doing so. He speaks to you 
and me very often; I am afraid that we are less attentive 
than we ought to be to what he says. He speaks in the 
thoughts which he suggests, in the purposes which he 

52 



THE GREAT ADVENTURE 

prompts, in the wishes that he kindles, in the impulses 
which he sets in motion. If God is a spirit and we are 
spirits and the fellowship and communion of the Holy 
Spirit is not a meaningless phrase, then God must be often 
working in us thus, — moving thus upon our minds, — to will 
and to work of his good pleasure. 

But there is nothing in these communications as we re- 
ceive them which marks them off from the operations of our 
own minds; the divine influence flows into our lives noise- 
lessly, and mingles itself with our thinking and wishing and 
willing, to purify, to enlighten, to uplift our lives. It does 
not thrust itself upon us; it does not domineer over us; it 
leaves us free to heed or to spurn its suggestions. We can 
resist the Holy Ghost, and we do, probably, every day. The 
good wish springs within us, and we hear the sneer with 
which this present world will greet it if we give it voice, and 
we smother it in our souls. How much better men and 
women we would have been if we had obeyed all the good 
impulses that the spirit of all truth has awakened in our 
hearts. 

Now I cannot doubt that God was speaking to Abraham 
all the while just as he speaks to us. Perhaps the big differ- 
ence between us and Abraham is that he listened a good 
deal more than we do; he got in the habit of listening. There 
was so much less talk of other kinds going on, in those days, 
that a man out on the plains, under the stars, had a chance 
to listen. And these silent conversations between the spirit 
of Abraham and the Father of his spirit were so frequent 

53 



THE INTERPRETER 

and so intimate that he came to rely upon them, and to 

respond perhaps more promptly than some of us are wont 

to do to these suggestions. 

And yet there may not have been, and I cannot believe 

that there were, any positive dictations to him of the will 

of God. I cannot believe it because I prefer to believe that 

Abraham was led, just as you and I are led, by his reason 

and his love, into the ways of obedience. What happened 

to him, perhaps, was this : It was borne in upon him — 

that is the way we sometimes phrase it — that he ought to 

leave his home and go down to Canaan. There were 

reasons, no doubt, reasons not put down in the story. 

His father had started for Canaan a good many years 

before and had halted by the way. Now Abraham felt that 

he must go. It was a good thing to do, a great thing to 

do, — one of the kind of things which that great unseen 

Friend was always putting him up to do. Compared with 

the other things that he might do, this, as he saw it, was 

clearly the finest and the largest. That was what made him 

sure that God was telling him to do it. That is God's way 

of telling men to do things; it always has been, it always 

will be. Yet it does not involve such a literal and positive 

expression of the divine will that there can be no question 

about it. What God wants of man in every age is faith 

in him, not mere submission to his dictation. And Browning 

says truly : 

" You must mix some uncertainty, 
With faith, if you would have faith be." 

54 



THE GREAT ADVENTURE 

" Abraham believed God." If there hadn't been room 
for doubt there couldn't have been belief. Abraham 
might have questioned this impression made upon his mind, 
— the impression that he ought to go. He might have 
said, " How do I know, after all, that this is the right thing 
to do? Who knows that I shall be better off down there in 
Canaan than I am here, in Haran? This isn't a bad place 
to live. I shall have to make many sacrifices if I leave 
here; maybe I shall be more prosperous there, but I 
want to be shown." 

For something like this there was room in the old 
patriarch's mind, as there is in the mind of every man who 
is called to larger and nobler life. Every such vocation 
involves a risk; it is letting go of certainties, it is launching 
forth upon uncharted seas. Whenever something higher, 
finer, better, calls a man, there are always queries, scruples, 
prudences, expediences, selfishnesses that hold him back. 
And the great adventure is the choice in the face of these 
dissuasives, of what, in his inner self, he believes to be the 
higher good. It may come to men in high station, bearing 
the destinies of nations in their hands; it may come to 
men in humble places, responsible for themselves or their 
households; the choice confronts us all, and the great 
adventure invites every one of us. What is it the poet 
says? 

" Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide, 
In the strife 'twixt truth and falsehood, for the good or evil 
side." 

55 



THE INTERPRETER 

Once? Once a day perhaps; often once an hour. Life 
is a succession of critical choices; every day we may be 
making decisions whose consequences will reach farther 
than we know. 

To another Abraham, no less faithful, there came, in 
our own day, a choice no less momentous. To him came 
the call to lead his people into the promised land of free- 
dom. He told his cabinet that he had promised God that 
he would do it. Evidently he felt sure that in doing that 
he was doing God's will. But it was a great adventure; 
it must have been. There were obstacles in the way; 
there were doubts, there were reasons for doubt; but this, 
after all, seemed to him the greatest, the worthiest, the 
noblest thing to do; if so it must be God's way; and by the 
might of his own overcoming faith he led the people into 
it. He thought that God had told him to do it, and he 
believed God. 

But it is not the patriarchs and the presidents alone who 
are called to make the great adventure; before the feet of 
most of us the better way, the larger life is forever opening. 
The call may be heard by the humblest souls in the un- 
likeliest places. 

In the absolute darkness of a coal-mine, down in West 
Virginia, forty years ago, a negro boy thirteen years old 
overheard two men talking about a great school in Virginia 
where one could pay for his schooling by his labor, and learn 
at the same time some trade or industry. The words 
struck fire in the boy's brain. " I resolved at once," he 

56 



THE GREAT ADVENTURE 

says, "to go to that school, though I had no idea where it 
was or how many miles away, or how I was going to reach 
it. I remember only that I was on fire constantly with 
one ambition, and that thought was to go to Hampton. 
This thought was with me day and night." 

It was two years before he was able to start on this 
journey; then he set forth with all his wardrobe in a small 
hand-satchel, with very little money in his purse, on a 
journey of five hundred miles, most of it on foot, to his 
Promised Land. " He went forth, not knowing whither 
he went." He only felt sure that something higher, stronger, 
better than himself was calling him. Before he had been 
at Hampton long he began to discern the meaning of the 
call. " I got my first taste " he said, " of what it meant to 
live a life of unselfishness, my first knowledge of the fact 
that the happiest individuals are those who do the most to 
make others useful and happy." 

That was Booker Washington's calling and election of 
God. The word that came to him in the West Virginia 
coal mine was as truly a divine revelation as that which 
came to Abram in Haran, or to Saul on the Damascus road, 
and he could have said, as truly as Paul said to Agrippa: 
" I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision." And 
what a quest it was, on which he set forth. Sir Galahad's 
search for the Grail was no more knightly, no more holy. 
To win hope and opportunity, life and light, manhood and 
womanhood for ten millions of his fellow men, — this was 
his great adventure; how bravely he threw his life into it, 

57 



THE INTERPRETER 

and how gloriously he succeeded in his mission! Few lives 
have been lived upon this planet that come nearer to the 
measure of the stature of a man, than that of Booker 
Washington. 

What your great adventure may be I cannot tell. It 
may start from a humble place; Jesus hailed from Nazareth; 
could any good thing come out of Nazareth? It may 
lead you along lonely ways; but whoever and wherever 
you are, I know that there is before you a goal worth 
striving for, a prize worth winning. You are a child of 
God, and therefore there is for you — for every one of 
you — a high calling. That old poem of Longfellow's 
that the critics have so often ridiculed, — the youth passing 
through the Alpine village, bearing the banner with the 
strange device " Excelsior," and hearing as he toiled on- 
ward the call always repeated, " Higher! Higher! " is 
nothing to laugh at; it is the voice that every man hears 
who has ears to hear. What Benham says, in " The 
Research Magnificent," is what every sincere and veracious 
soul must say : — 

" I know there is a better life than this muddle about me; 
a better life possible now. I know it. A better individual 
life and a better public life. If I had no other assurance, 
if I were blind to the glorious intimations of art, to the 
perpetually widening promise of science, to the mysterious 
beckonings of beauty in form and color and the inaccessible 
mockery of the stars, I should still know this from the 
insurgent spirit within me ; this idea of a life breaking 

58 



THE GREAT ADVENTURE 

away from the common life to something better is the 
consuming idea in my mind." 

There are minutes when you all know it. Don't forget 
it! Don't doubt it! Follow the gleam! 



59 



IV 
GOD IN THE GARDEN 



IV 
GOD IN THE GARDEN 

And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking 
in the garden in the cool of the day. — Gen. 3 : 8. 

Many of us can recall the day when these first chapters 
of Genesis were universally accepted as a historical narra- 
tive of the origin of the human race. There was difficulty, 
indeed, in adjusting all the features of the narrative, for 
some portions of it appear to be clearly symbolical rather 
than historical, and the commentators were puzzled to tell 
where the symbolical leaves off and the historical begins. 
It may be prudent to let Dr. Marcus Dods, one of the 
staid Presbyterian expositors, indicate some of the per- 
plexities : 

" When we read that the serpent was more subtile than 
any beast of the field that the Lord God had made, and that 
he tempted the woman, we at once perceive that it is not 
with the outer husk of the story we are to concern our- 
selves but with the kernel. The narrative throughout 
speaks of nothing but the serpent ; not a word is said of the 
devil; not the slightest hint is given that the machinations 
of a fallen angel are signified. . . . No one, I suppose, 
believes that the whole tribe of serpents crawl as a punish- 

63 



THE INTERPRETER 

ment of an offense committed by one of their number, or 
that the iniquity and sorrow of the world are due to an 
actual serpent. Plainly this is a pictorial representation 
intended to convey some general impressions and ideas. 
Vitally important truths underlie the narrative and are 
bodied forth by it ; but the way to reach these truths is not 
to adhere too rigidly to the literal meaning, but to catch 
the general impression which it seems fitted to make. 

" No doubt this opens the door to a great variety of 
interpretation. No two men will attach to it precisely the 
same meaning. One says the serpent is a symbol for Satan, 
but Adam and Eve are historical persons. Another says 
the tree of knowledge of good and evil is a figure, but 
the driving out from the garden is real. Another maintains 
that the whole is a picture, putting in a visible, intelligible 
(and of course symbolic) shape certain vitally important 
truths regarding the history of our race. So that every 
man is left very much to his own judgment to read the 
narrative candidly and in such fight from other sources as he 
has, and let it make its own impression upon him." 

That is the kind of use we shall make of it this morning. 
We do not suppose that we have in the third chapter of 
Genesis a historical narrative; we suppose that we are read- 
ing a parable in which certain moral and spiritual truths 
are set forth. 

We are not, however, proposing this morning to try to 
elucidate the doctrine of the fall of man, so far as that may 
be here symbolized; we confine ourselves to one trait of 

64 



GOD IN THE GARDEN 

the narrative — the walking of the Lord God in the 
Garden. 

We have here the suggestion of a relation between man 
and his Maker, between the human child and his divine 
Father, which is significant and instructive. It is clear 
that to the writer of this narrative such a visit as he here 
describes, of the Creator to his creature, was nothing out 
of the ordinary. The writer has some definite notions of 
the greatness and the power of Him who had formed the 
earth out of nothing, and had stocked it with the kingdom of 
life and had hung the firmament above it; but between that 
great Being and the inhabitants of this earth the relations 
were close and personal — friendly, not to say neighborly. 
We do not find him speculating much about the form of 
God or the metaphysical contents of his nature; he seems 
to assume that God is kindred to man; that man is capable 
of knowing God, of entering into familiar friendship with 
him. That was true of the writers of all the narratives that 
are gathered up for us in these first books of the Bible; 
they had no doubt that God could easily make himself 
visible and audible to men; that he could communicate 
with them immediately and unmistakably; that they 
might meet him, and recognize him any day, upon the high- 
way; that he might come to their door and ask for enter- 
tainment and tarry with them for the night — as he did with 
Abraham and with Lot. The fact that the Lord God had 
come walking in the garden in the cool of the day should 
not, then, have caused any surprise or confusion to Adam. 

65 



THE INTERPRETER 

Such a call could not have been unexpected by him, and 
the writer does not mean so to represent it. Visitors from 
the heavenly world might happen in at any time. 

Adam and Eve were, indeed, confused on this occasion, 
but it was not because such visitations were unusual; 
it was because of some misconduct of their own. A psy- 
chological crisis had occurred in their experience which 
caused them to be ill at ease. Into that I am not going on 
this occasion. It is rather upon what this writer suggests 
as the normal relations between God and man that I wish to 
dwell. 

You may say that this is a childish representation of 
these relations. It is, indeed. That is why it interests 
me. That is why I think it may have some real value for 
us. For there was surely some meaning in what Jesus 
said about the closeness of the little children to the deepest 
facts of life. And Wordsworth's testimony, that heaven 
lies about us in our infancy, is not altogether incredible. 
Upon the fresh perceptions and sensations of a little child 
some impressions are doubtless made that the dulled 
faculties of later years fail to note. And so it may be that 
the child-ages sometimes got a nearer and truer view of 
the deep things of life than the more sophisticated cen- 
turies get. And I wonder if there is not something in these 
earlier conceptions of the relation between ourselves and 
the Power not ourselves which we might recover, — some- 
thing without which there must always be in our lives a 
sense of want and incompleteness. 

66 



GOD IN THE GARDEN 

Something of this sense of lack in our appreciation of the 
significance of the world about us is expressed by Words- 
worth in that famous sonnet : — 

" The world is too much with us; late and soon, 

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; 

Little we see in Nature that is ours ; 
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon. 
The sea that bares her bosom to the moon, 

The winds that will be howling at all hours, 

And are upgathered now, like sleeping flowers, — 
For this, for everything, we are out of tune. 

It moves us not. Great God, I'd rather be 

A Pagan, suckled on a creed outworn, 
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn ; 
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, 

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn." 

What is this feeling of forlornness which Wordsworth 
expresses? For whom is he speaking? Not mainly for 
himself, I think. It is rather a vicarious confession. He 
is trying to give voice to the consciousness of the multitude 
with whom he mingles daily. He feels that the men who 
are completely immersed in the business of the world, and 
who are dealing only with the materialistic and scientific 
and commercial aspects of nature must find themselves 
in a lonesome place. When you have reduced the Universe 
to mechanism, no matter how cunningly contrived, you 
have made for yourself a desert. Carlyle, in " Sartor 
Resartus," describes the desolation of that experience as 
he recalls it : — 

" Now when I look back, it was a strange isolation I then 

67 



THE INTERPRETER 

lived in. The men and women round about me, even 
speaking with me, were but figures; I had practically forgot- 
ten that they were alive, that they were not merely auto- 
matic. In midst of crowded streets and assemblages I 
walked solitary; and (except that it was my own heart, 
not another's, that I kept devouring), savage also, as the 
tiger in his jungle. Some comfort it would have been 
could I, like a Faust, have fancied myself ■ tempted and 
tormented of the Devil; for a Hell, I imagine, without life, 
though only diabolic life, were more frightful; but in our 
age of downpulling and disbelief the very devil has been 
pulled down; you cannot so much as believe in a devil. 
To me the Universe was all void of life, of purpose, of 
volition, even of hostility; it was one huge, dead, im- 
measurable steam-engine, rolling on in its dead indifference, 
to grind me limb from limb." 

Such is a highly emotional account of the condition in 
which a man is left when the mechanical theory of the 
universe gets full possession of him. Forlorn he is, beyond 
a doubt; there is nothing left in the world about him that 
answers to the deepest longings of his own spirit; there is 
no love there; there is no life there. Perhaps he does 
not know what ails him; he is restless and discontented, 
and he rushes hither and thither after all sorts of excite- 
ments and sensations that will drown his sense of forlorn- 
ness. The frantic pursuit of pleasure, in this generation, 
is the fruit of this sense of loneliness. If, like Wordsworth, 
he is familiar with the old nature worship, and knows how 

68 



GOD IN THE GARDEN 

the Greeks peopled nature with beings from another 
world, and so found themselves constantly in the presence 
of messengers who might bring them tidings from other 
realms, he might naturally cry out after that simpler and 
more primitive faith which made nature not a dead mechan- 
ism but a living organism. 

It will not be possible, however, for us to restore those 
ancient conceptions. We shall never see Proteus rising 
from the sea nor hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn. 
The old nature worship will never feed our faith, nor shall 
we ever be able to teach ourselves to expect with Abraham 
and Lot, in any literal sense, to welcome the Lord of all 
the earth as a guest at our tables or a sojourner under our 
roof, or to hear his voice, as Adam heard it, as he walks in 
our gardens in the cool of the day. That kind of com- 
munication is not for us. 

And yet may we not also hope for and share the essential 
good which these patriarchs enjoyed? Were their rela- 
tions any more close and real with the Lord God of grace 
and truth than ours may be? Was the Infinite Father 
more friendly to them than he is to us? I cannot believe 
any such thing. I am sure that the friendship with the 
source of all Truth and Love, which they interpreted by 
these homely and domestic symbols, is not withdrawn from 
you and me. We know that we shall not see God in the 
form of a man walking along the highway or entering 
our front gate; but there is today a blessing for the 
pure in heart, because they may see him; and, I 

69 



THE INTERPRETER 

trust, no less clearly than those men of the olden times 
saw him. 

It is not through the senses that he will be revealed to 
us. Eye hath not seen and will never see, — ear hath not 
heard and will never hear, — the things which God hath 
prepared for them that love him ; the revelation is made by 
the Spirit and in the spirit — to the inner self — to the 
intuitions, the feelings, the spiritual nature. But it may 
be just as convincing, just as satisfying as if the eye had 
seen it or the ear had heard it. Indeed, the things of which 
I am most sure are things which none of my senses ever 
told me. My moral insights, my discernment of spiritual 
values, my faith in the goodness of God and in the integrity 
and the truth and the purity and the fidelity of those I 
love best, my assurance that righteousness and justice and 
goodwill will be victorious over all forms of selfishness and 
greed and malice — all these things are the real things, the 
sure things of my experience, and I am indebted to my 
senses for none of them. It is through my commerce with 
a realm beyond the senses that these things have been 
made realities to me. And in that realm beyond the senses, 
the realm of the ideal, the realm of the spirit, God appears 
to men just as truly now as he ever did. 

I am inclined to believe, therefore, that this picture of 
God walking in the garden in the cool of the day may as- 
sist our faith, if we use it as a symbol. It is not said, 
you observe, that Adam and Eve saw him. They " heard 
the voice of the Lord God " walking in the garden — the 

70 



GOD IN THE GARDEN 

sound — the margin has it. It may have been the breeze 
and they thought it was his breath. It matters not. 
Somehow he found his way directly to their consciousness. 
Something was said to them which they were sure came 
from him, which they understood, and to which in their 
thoughts, they had to make reply. 

It was a likely place, I am sure, for them to meet with 
God. They might well have expected to find him there. 
Even if there had been nothing miraculous about it, — 
no impressions on their senses, nothing but the impression 
made upon their thought — it would have been a fitting 
place to commune with him. 

" Some of the [Hebrew] conceptions of Deity in early 

ages," says Sir Oliver Lodge, " are no doubt childish. 

Jehovah, for instance, is said to walk in a garden in the 

cool of the day, as Zeus walked in the Garden of the 

Hesperides, where likewise bloomed well-guarded apples. 

But these things are childish in the good sense; they are 

poetical modes of expression for a reality. Surely from a 

beautiful garden the Deity is not absent, or, as the Manx 

poet says : 

' ' A garden is a lovesome thing, God wot. 
Rose plot, 
Fringed pool, 
Ferned grot, 
The veriest school 
Of peace; and yet the fool 

Contends that God is not. — 
Not God! in gardens! when the eve is cool ? 
Nay, but I have a sign : 
'Tis very sure God walks in mine.' " 

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THE INTERPRETER 

It is not, indeed, an uncommon thing, even in these days 
for men to meet God in gardens, and such like places, and 
to hold sweet converse with him there. Matthew Arnold 
met him once, I am sure, in Kensington Garden, and heard 
his voice quite clearly: — 

" In this lone open glade I lie 

Screened by deep boughs on either hand, 
And at its end, to stay the eye, 

Those black-crowned red-boled pine-trees stand. 

Birds here make song; each bird has his, 

Across the girdling city's hum; 
How green under the boughs it is! 

How thick the tremulous sheep-cries come! 

Here at my feet what wonders pass! 

What endless active life is here! 
What blowing daisies, fragrant grass! 

An air-stirred forest, fresh and clear! 

Yet here is peace forever new; 

When I, who watch them, am away, 
Still all things in this glade go through 

The changes of their quiet day. 

Then to their happy rest they pass; 

The flowers upclose, the birds are fed, 
The night comes down upon the grass, 

The child sleeps warmly in his bed. 

Calm Soul of all things, — be it mine 

To feel, amid the city's jar, 
That there abides a peace of thine 

Man did not make and cannot mar; 

72 



GOD IN THE GARDEN 

The will to neither strive nor cry, 

The power to feel with others give; 
Calm, calm me more, nor let me die 

Before I have begun to live ! " 

And Wordsworth in that lovely valley of the Wye, near 
Tintern Abbey — a valley which is all a garden — had 
speech with him that has lit up the meaning of life for many 
of us. 

Let me not seem to say that it is only in the gardens 
and the beauty-spots of earth that men meet God; if their 
eyes are anointed to see him and they have ears to hear, they 
may discern him in the thronged city thoroughfare, in the 
murk of the coal mine, in the din of the iron mill, in the 
noisome slum — wherever humanity is fighting life's 
battles or bearing its burdens. James Oppenheim finds 
him — wonderful and inspiring tokens of his presence — in 
the Bowery at night — not the quarter in which the saints 
are disposed to go in quest of him. All these manifesta- 
tions of his presence I believe in, and I desire nothing more 
than that anointing of the vision by which I may perceive 
his presence in sordid and sunken places and his beauty 
in coarse and crippled lives. But for those of us whose 
spiritual perceptions are less keen there is profit in remem- 
bering that in the " lovesome " and peaceful places he is 
apt to be found — sure to be found, if with all our hearts 
we truly seek him. I am sure that he likes to be in such 
places, with the trees and the herbage and the flowers 
and the cool green grasses; and in the quiet hours we 

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THE INTERPRETER 

may find him there and hear his voice, if we have ears 
to hear. 

There is one trait of this old picture which seems to me 
significant. To Adam and Eve it appeared that the Lord 
God was walking in the garden, in the cool of the day — 
" taking his pleasure," Professor Mitchell says; it was 
his garden as well as theirs, and, according to the homely 
and childish conception of the writer of the story, he was 
making himself at home there. If Adam and Eve had been 
obedient and faithful to their trust, nothing would have 
pleased them better. And I do not think that we shall be 
stretching the meaning of this parable if we say that 
this is the kind of relation which the Father of our spirits 
wishes to maintain with all his children. He never in- 
trudes. Every man's personality is sacred. Every man's 
house is his castle. Every man's garden is his privacy. 
But he would like to have it so that he could come in at 
any quiet hour and have a talk with us about the work and 
the children and the farm and the school and the shop 
and the office. If we could find a way to give him the 
freedom of the garden — and the house, for that matter — 
at any rate of some of the quiet places where we have a 
little chance to be by ourselves, it might be a wholesome 
thing. He never breaks through any of our enclosures; 
he never enters our consciousness without being bidden: 
" Behold," is his word, " I stand at the door and knock; 
if any man hear my voice and will open the door, I will come 
in to him, and will sup with him and he with me." 

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GOD IN THE GARDEN 

The two unhappy denizens of the first Garden were 
afraid, when they heard the Lord God walking in it, and 
they hid themselves among the trees. The naivete of the 
story is delightful. Children they must have been to 
imagine that they could hide from the All-seeing One. 
It is possible that to some of us the presence in the pre- 
cincts of our lives of Him from whom nothing is concealed 
might seem to be unwelcome. It may be that we have 
reasons for not wishing for familiar intercourse with him. 
None of us, of course, imagines that he can hide from him, 
but if it is true that he only knocks and waits to be bidden, 
then we can make sure that he will not come in. And 
perhaps some of us are rather glad that we can keep him 
out. Does any one really think that that would be a 
rational thing to do? 

Granted that it is possible to have friendly intercourse 
between our spirits and the Spirit of all truth and goodness; 
granted also that it is possible for us, by the action of our 
own wills, to bar that influence out of our lives, would it 
be, for any man, a rational thing to do? Very likely there 
may be some things that you would rather not talk about 
with him. But those things, as you very well know, are 
not hidden from him. Is there anything better for you 
to do than to make a clean breast of these matters to him? 
Is there anything else for a sensible man to do? Can you 
afford to take any other judgment on yourself than the 
judgment of perfect truth and perfect justice? And can 
you ever hope to find any one who will be more considerate, 

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THE INTERPRETER 

more merciful, or more friendly to one who has gone wrong 
than the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ? No, 
my friend, whatever your faults or failures may have been, 
I would not, if I were you, think of hiding from the face of 
my greatest Friend; and I would not bar him out of my 
solitude; I would leave the garden gate wide open, and 
expect him. He will not fail to come if you expect him, and 
if you are perfectly honest with him, it cannot fail to be 
well with you. 

Many of you, in the weeks now before you, in your own 
gardens, or in the meadow paths, or in the forest silences, 
or by the river side, or on the mountain tops, will be where 
the Lord God is walking. I hope that you will sometimes 
hear his voice. It will not always, I trust, be a voice of 
reproof or condemnation; I hope that it will often be a 
voice of counsel, of encouragement, of comfort, of inspira- 
tion; I hope that it will light up the dark places in your 
own life, and strengthen your hold on the things unseen 
and eternal; that it will bring you closer in sympathy and 
trust to Him who not only walks in the gardens in the cool 
of the day, but along the ploughman's furrow in the morn- 
ing, and among the noisy factories at noon, and through 
the dark and fetid alleys by night — the Friend and Com- 
rade of all who labor, of all who suffer, of all who stumble 
or wander from the way. I wish that you may meet him 
more than once or twice in the cool and restful places where 
you may be abiding or sojourning; and that you may have 
frequent and frank speech with him about the things that 

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GOD IN THE GARDEN 

most concern you. From such communings we should 
return, I am sure, when the summer heats are past, with a 
new sense of the meaning of life, with new hope and cour- 
age for the tasks upon our hands, and in that quest of good 
to which our lives are given, 

" Strong in will 
To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield." 



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V 
LOYALTY 



V 
LOYALTY 

When the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith 
in the earth? — Luke 18 : 8. 

This word faith sometimes means belief, the intellectual 
acceptance of truth; and it sometimes means fidelity, 
the promise-keeping virtue, the root of faithfulness. 
" Recognition of and allegiance to the obligations of 
morals and honor; adherence to the laws of right and 
wrong, especially in fulfilling one's promises; faithfulness; 
fidelity; loyalty"; thus the dictionary man defines and 
discriminates. Milton makes Adam say of his wife that 
he ought to conceal her failing while her faith to him re- 
mains. And it is what Tennyson is singing about when he 
tells Lady Clara Vere de Vere that 

" Kind hearts are more than coronets 
And simple faith than Norman blood." 

It is what we mean when we speak of " keeping faith " 
with another, or talk of " good faith " in a transaction, 
or a narration. In national parlance the Romans used 
to speak of " Punic faith," thus turning Carthaginian 
treachery into a proverb; and the French have long talked 
of "la per fide Albion" though perhaps they are not using 

81 



THE INTERPRETER 

that epithet so freely just now. This meaning of the word 
is familiar to all of us ; and there are a number of important 
texts in the Bible in which this meaning should be em- 
phasized instead of the idea of belief. For instance " the 
faith of God " is sometimes appealed to, and that means 
his faithfulness, of course; and there are several cases in 
which the word faithfulness, in our English versions, 
represents the Greek word tt«ttis ; usually rendered faith. 
Precisely what Jesus meant by it may not be clear; 
but he had just been talking about the unjust judge, and 
the difficulty that good men experienced of getting justice 
done them, here; and it would seem that he must have 
been thinking of some possible lack of fidelity or loyalty 
rather than of any lack of orthodoxy, which he might dis- 
cover on his return to earth. That, I am sure, was the 
matter upon which there was most reason for solicitude. 
That was true then, and it has always been true. There 
has never been much difficulty in finding people who were 
willing to believe almost any conceivable theory or dogma; 
but there has always been some difficulty in finding enough 
of those who were ready 

" With hand and body and blood 
To make their bosom's counsel good." 

If Jesus had returned to earth in any of the centuries 
since he went away, he would have found abundance of 
credulity — multitudes who were eager to accept any 
theological propositions which might be offered them. 
Even in these days, a crowd seems to be waiting on every 

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LOYALTY 

street corner to swallow any vagary, no matter how pre- 
posterous, that is promulgated in the name of religion; 
and the tale of the sects lengthens as the years increase. 

But the number of those who are known as faithful men 
and women, who keep their contracts, and live up to their 
covenants and remember their promises, and can be de- 
pended on to make good, in all their obligations to God and 
men, — of these the number increases much less rapidly. 

I am not saying that the number does not increase; I 
think that you can always find such people; it has been my 
good fortune to meet a good many of them, often in humble 
stations, — men and women not always brilliant or learned 
or refined or renowned, but absolutely true and always 
dependable. A pretty large share of my comfort in life 
has always been due to the fidelity of such people. 

I do not suppose that our Master meant to deny the 
existence of such people; perhaps he had just been con- 
fronting the unfaithfulness which often looms up about us, 
so vast, and so portentous, and so disheartening, and it 
wrung from him this rather querulous outcry. If Jesus 
was human, and I think he was, he must have had these 
moments of depression. The Psalmist was in the same 
mood when he cried out : 

" The Lord looked down from heaven upon the children of men, 
To see if there were any that did understand, 
That did seek after God. 

They are all gone aside; they are together become filthy, 
There is none that doeth good, no, not one." 

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THE INTERPRETER 

What good men say when they are in such moods, is 
not to be reckoned against them; much less is it to be used 
as it often is, as the basis of dogmatic propositions about 
human nature. There are times when most of us feel like 
saying what the Psalmist said in his haste — that all 
men are liars — and when we are inclined to think that every 
man is a rascal; but we should be ashamed to build a 
philosophy of life on these assumptions or to try to work 
them out in our practical relations with our fellow men. 
On the whole we build our lives on a philosophy of trust; 
we could not build on any other assumption; the most 
pessimistic of us is compelled to assume that human nature 
is, when all is said, fundamentally trustworthy; the fact 
that one is so disappointed and resentful when men prove 
false or treacherous shows that he had been expecting them 
to be true and loyal, and that he had a right to expect it. 

I am sure, therefore, that Jesus did not mean that his 
despairing words should be taken literally. He knew that 
whenever he returned to earth, whether in the flesh or in 
the spirit, he would find faithful men and women here. 
That last prayer of his in which he so tenderly speaks of 
those whom the Father has given him, who are his forever- 
more, who have so loyally kept the truth committed to 
them and whom he so confidently commends to the Father's 
care, is evidence of his abiding expectation that there would 
be some faithful ones to greet him if he should return. 
Nor can we imagine him to have no prevision of the multi- 
tudes whose souls would be kindled by his own great 

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LOYALTY 

loyalty, and who for his sake, and because of him, in every 
great test of character, would be faithful unto death. We 
cannot give the right value to this saying of our Master 
unless these things of which I have been speaking are fully 
taken into account. 

And yet these words of Jesus are not to be dismissed as 
the mere whimsical reflection of a discouraged and disil- 
lusioned mood. There was reason for the discouragement; 
and many a brave and true disciple has felt the same heart- 
sinking. And I dare say that it is often borne in upon the 
consciousness of many of us that the deepest trouble with 
human nature and human society is this lack to which Jesus 
is pointing in the text, the lack of loyalty. Forasmuch 
as this virtue of loyalty comes near to being the founda- 
tion of character, and the constructive principle of the 
social order, the absence of it is fatal, and any deficiency 
of it is deplorable. 

Loyalty, as Professor Royce has defined it, is " the willing 
and thorough-going devotion of a self to a cause, when the 
cause is something which unites many (or few) selves in 
one, and which is therefore the interest of a community. 
For a loyal human being the interest of the community 
to which he belongs is superior to every merely individual 
interest of his own." 

Loyalty begins, of course, in the primary groups. The 
first call for it is in the family; even when the family 
consists of only two, there is ample room for it. The 
family, when it is formed, is a community which enshrines 

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THE INTERPRETER 

something more sacred than the added interests of one 
man and one woman; the blending of the two lives has 
created something that was not in either life or in both 
lives before. The same kind of thing has happened which 
Browning describes in Abt Vogler, when two sounds, 
mixed with a third, make harmony, which is something 
new and marvellous : — 

" And I know not if, save in this, such gift be allowed to man, — 
That out of three sounds he frame, not a fourth sound, but a star. 
Consider it well ; each tone of our scale in itself is naught ; 
It is everywhere in the world; loud, soft, and all is said; 
Give it to me to use! I mix it with two in my thought ; 
And, there! Ye have heard and seen; consider and bow the head!" 

Something quite like this happens when two lives unite 
to form the sacred community of the family. The two 
are one, but the one is much more than the sum of the 
two, just as water is something more than so many units 
of hydrogen plus so many units of oxygen. 

Of this primal community the bond is loyalty; it brings 
such bounty when it comes, and it leaves such vacancy 
when it goes! As this community grows, and the lines of 
its relationship lengthen, laterally through marriage, and 
vertically, by the generations; and the bonds multiply, 
and the relationships become more extended; the sense of 
a common interest draws the family together and develops 
a devotion which, in its best estate, is about the best thing 
on earth. In nothing, I think, does our human nature 
give a better account of itself than in these family loyalties, 
in the firmness with which they hold the group together, in 

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LOYALTY 

weal and in woe, in honor and dishonor, through evil re- 
port and through good report. It is a virtue that can be 
exaggerated, no doubt, but it is not likely to be; and we all 
think better of any man or woman, of any boy or girl who 
holds the family honor dear, and strengthens the bonds 
that bind it together. 

Other groups are formed, by relationships more or less 
sacred, and often with far wider boundaries — groups with 
which we become identified, and by which this spirit of 
loyalty is invoked. Sometimes the bond is religion; there 
is a phase of religious truth which the group has accepted, 
and it constitutes a cause which demands the devotion of 
its adherents, and calls forth their loyalty. 

Sometimes political ideas furnish the bond; it is a politi- 
cal party to which we are expected to be loyal. 

Sometimes it is some cause of moral or social reform 
which has gathered its advocates and promoters, and 
summons them to be faithful to the obligations they have 
assumed. 

And since society has passed, in Sir Henry Maine's 
phrase, from status to contract, most of us find ourselves, 
in the greater part of our lives, living in relations of one 
kind or another in which faithfulness is required. Busi- 
ness or professional obligations of some sort rest upon 
most of us. There are duties to discharge, engagements to 
keep, services to render, debts to meet, bills to pay, con- 
tracts to fulfil, tasks to perform, with respect to which 
others have claims upon us. The whole of industrial, 

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THE INTERPRETER 

commercial, civil society is a network of obligations of 
this nature, in which every one of us depends on the faithful- 
ness of numberless other persons. If I default in any one of 
my obligations, many others, some near me, others far away 
from me, of whom I know nothing, may suffer the conse- 
quences. If I am habitually and constitutionally unfaith- 
ful to my obligations, my conduct runs a flaw through the 
whole web of the social structure of which I form a part. 

There is another and larger relationship to which this 
principle applies even more closely. The obligation of 
citizenship is one of the primary obligations. I am a 
citizen of the United States, not because of any choice of my 
own, nor of any privilege conferred on me by my ancestors, 
but simply because I was born here, and have always 
lived here. I owe to the United States the obligation of 
loyalty, not because I have promised to render it, nor be- 
cause anybody has promised for me; but simply because 
I am a citizen. " For a loyal human being," says Professor 
Royce, " the interest of the community to which he be- 
longs is superior to every merely individual interest of 
his own." This, of course, is true of that comprehensive 
community which we call the state or the nation. 

Now it is true of all these groups and relationships of 
which I have spoken that the fundamental virtue, the 
constructive principle, is loyalty — faithfulness to the 
obligation which the group implies, and implicitly, if not 
explicitly, enforces. So that we may speak of loyalty as 
the fundamental social virtue. Its presence makes society 

88 



LOYALTY 

coherent; its absence means social disintegration. If our 
Lord, at his coming, should not find faith on the earth, he 
would find all things hastening to decay. The evidence 
that his kingdom was coming would be the presence of 
faith everywhere among men, as shown in the good fidelities 
of social intercourse; men and women, boys and girls, 
standing in their places, keeping their promises, performing 
their tasks, meeting their obligations, expressed or im- 
plied. If there is anything deplorable and discouraging, 
it is the absence of this spirit from society; if there is any- 
thing promising in our social relations, it is the indication 
that this spirit of faithfulness is growing in the hearts of 
the people. 

How fundamental this principle is, in our national life, 
is shown by a discussion in one of our thoughtful journals 
entitled: "Why We Distrust Our Government." The writer 
points out that this distrust of our government is our 
fundamental national weakness. He says that " to com- 
mand its human forces the government must have the 
confidence of the people"; and that " to use its human 
forces and its material forces effectively, the government 
must be capable and honest; it must be organized and 
managed in such manner as to make efficient action practi- 
cable. None of these results has been attained. Our 
government is not trusted; our government has not de- 
veloped expertness in organization and management." 

Then he goes on to enumerate some of the concrete facts 
which stare us in the face : — 

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THE INTERPRETER 

" We have been spending hundreds of millions every year 
on our army and navy — about as much as Germany has 
been spending — and are now so ill-equipped for defense 
that we have had to call out the state troops to police the 
Mexican border. 

" Our army posts have been scattered about in congres- 
sional districts, not because of their value for defense or the 
training of men, but to help congressmen get votes. 

" Our navy yards have been located at strategic points 
for vote getting, in many cases being so ill-adapted for the 
purposes of their establishment that naval officers them- 
selves have urged their abandonment." 

Of the hundreds of millions of dollars appropriated from 
the public treasury for river and harbor improvements and 
public buildings, a very large share has been wasted — 
the interests of vote-getting and partizan bargaining being 
the main consideration — and so on and so on. The 
writer continues: — 

" The weakness and wastefulness in our governmental 
agencies, national, state, and municipal, constitute a condi- 
tion that cries out for remedy — that causes the people not 
alone to lose confidence in those who have been chosen to 
conduct their common business, but to doubt our republi- 
can institutions. We realize that our common business 
is conducted, not in a cooperative spirit, but by agencies 
which distrust one another. Congress distrusts the 
President, the President distrusts Congress; state legisla- 
tors distrust governors, and governors distrust legislators; 

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LOYALTY 

local councils distrust local executives, and vice versa; 
and the people distrust everybody and everything political 
or governmental." 

It should be added that we have a system of party politics 
whose primary business it seems to be to cultivate dis- 
trust. " Turn the rascals out " is the slogan of the political 
battle in both armies. We might almost say that party 
politics is the organization of distrust. 

The writer from whom I am quoting goes back to show 
that this principle of distrust figured largely in our na- 
tional life at the very beginning. I suppose it must al- 
ways be so, when liberties are won by force. Revolution- 
aries always naturally hate and distrust the powers against 
which they revolt. Naturally they regard all executive 
power with suspicion. The instinctive impulse is to de- 
prive governments of power; to make them as weak as 
possible. All the earlier maxims of our democracy reflected 
this judgment. " The state which is least governed is 
best governed." If that is true the ideal condition is 
anarchy — no government. 

It would seem that the prevalent theology of that period 
— the theology of the reformation — must have lent itself 
freely to this political programme. For it was founded on 
the doctrine of total depravity, on the theory that all men 
by nature are as bad as they can possibly be. The natural 
attitude of such human beings toward each other must 
therefore be that of distrust, an attitude which makes 
stable and coherent society impossible. It must be said 

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THE INTERPRETER 

that most men of that time were so much better than their 
theology, that they kept alive enough faith in one another 
to prevent the disintegration of society. But when they 
were trying to found their politics on distrust the doctrine 
of total depravity furnished support to the bad political 
philosophy. 

Certainly it was a frail and rotten foundation on which 
to build a state. But does it not explain why we have 
come to distrust our government? Does it not appear, in 
the words of our philosopher, that the defects of our 
government " are a logical product of the worship of weak- 
ness, a corollary of increasing distrust of the govern- 
ment by the people, and of distrust of the people by 
our constitution-makers? Irresponsibility, inefficiency, 
wastefulness, log-rolling and pork-barrel methods of satis- 
fying local constituencies, and invisible government — 
these are the products of an underlying fundamental 
error " — the error, namely, of building a state on the 
foundations of distrust. 

It is amazing that this stultifying error should have 
persisted through so many centuries. Its consequences 
are obvious enough. They stare us in the face every day of 
our lives. Its only fruit is confusion and disaster; it 
never was anything else and never can be. Faith, trust, 
confidence, loyalty — these are the foundations of the stable 
social order; they always have been and they always will 
be. Distrust is the breeder of disloyalty. If you want men 
to be faithful you must have faith in them. Is it not an 

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LOYALTY 

astonishing fact that after nineteen centuries of Christian- 
ity, when five hundred millions of the inhabitants of the 
earth are bearing Christ's name, so very few of them have 
got hold of this rudimentary principle of his teaching? 

Does it not dawn upon you, men and women, that the 
hour has struck when we who bear this name have got to 
begin to take our religion seriously? Is not this lack of 
loyalty, this lack of what is central and constructive in 
human society something for which we have got to find a 
remedy? Are we going to try to muddle along for another 
century or two with the kind of Christianity that we have 
been trying to make do, with the kind of democracy which 
seeks in mutual distrust its bond of union? 

I do not think that we shall manage it. I think that the 
guns which are blasting out the trenches around Verdun 
are digging the grave of that religion and that political 
philosophy. 

Mr. Wells tells us, in one of his latest books, that the 
question at issue in the quest for peace " is the power of 
human reason to prevail over passion." I would not 
put it in just that way. I haven't so much confidence in 
the power of reason to prevail over passion; but it seems to 
me that we might look for the time when rational beings 
would say: " We have suffered enough; let us find some 
relief. We have been working this principle of distrust 
for a great many centuries, and it has filled our 
lives with destruction and the world with ruin and misery; 
we know that this way won't work; let us find another way. 

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THE INTERPRETER 

We have been building on doubt, suspicion, fear; are 
there not safer and more enduring foundations? We have 
assumed that the eternal vigilance which watches against 
other people's treachery is the only safeguard of liberty; 
let us see if the enduring confidence which calls forth 
loyalty is not a safer reliance. 

Mr. Wells says that " the darkest shadow upon the out- 
look of European civilization at the present time is not the 
war; it is the failure of any cooperative spirit between labor 
and the directing classes." We have got to get rid of that, 
and it is only a sample of the things we have got to get rid 
of. And the thing that we have got to get hold of is faith 
in men, — the faith that makes faithful. 

If the Son of man should come today he would find this 
faith on the earth; less than we have a right to look for, 
but enough yet to leaven the nations. He would find 
men who believe with all their souls that faith is mightier 
than force even in the restraint of evil doers; men like 
Henry Ford, who take prisoners by the hand and bid them 
stand up and be men; men like Thomas Osborne, who go 
down to the bottom of a pit that is well-nigh bottomless, 
such as Sing Sing prison — and call darkened and hopeless 
men up into light and hope — and they come! 

When the Son of man comes he will find many more 
whose hearts have been kindled by the faith that makes 
faithful, by the love that inspires loyalty. Idealists men 
call them; it is apt to be a word of contempt. There are 
many other contemptuous and scornful words spoken in 

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LOYALTY 

these days concerning all who believe that weapons of good 
will are mightier than carnal weapons; let us try to forget 
that such words can be spoken; let us wait with patience 
for the day when all will know that the power of God is in 
the things which men count foolishness. 

And now, out of these reflections, what practical lessons 
have we learned? 

This, first, that since the welfare and peace of the earth 
depend on its loyalties, it is the first business of each one 
of us to be loyal, in every relation of life ; to be true to the 
trusts reposed in him; to be able to say at the end, what 
Paul said, " I have kept the faith." 

This, second : I want to be trusted ; I am going to deserve 
to be trusted ; if I am to be the man I ought to be I need to 
be trusted. This is the big debt the world owes me. 
Now every other man wants it, deserves it, needs it as 
much as I do. It is my second great business, therefore, 
to give to every human being the same measure of trust 
that I ask for myself. I must think about my neighbors as 
I want them to think about me. I must believe them capa- 
ble of the same loyalties that I myself approve. This 
thing has got to be reciprocal. To demand for myself a 
consideration and a respect that I do not extend to my 
neighbor is the essence of piggishness. Because I want to 
be trusted I must trust. 

The same is true of all groups, big or little. Employers 
need to be trusted by their employees, therefore they must 
trust them, and vice versa. Each must give the other the 

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THE INTERPRETER 

credit of being the same kind of man that he means to be 
and thinks he is. That is the essence of justice. That will 
put an end to all the trouble. 

It must be the law of nations, too. Every nation wants 
to be considered a pacific nation. Every nation in Europe 
is claiming that for herself today. What every nation 
demands for herself she must concede to her neighbors. 
No nation monopolizes all the goodness of the world. 
Even the United States does not. The United States 
wants other nations to trust her pacific purposes. There- 
fore she must trust their pacific purposes. Armaments 
are a proclamation, an advertisement of distrust. That 
is all they pretend to be. The way to keep war blazing 
and hell boiling on the earth is to keep on building them. 

All that is needed to bring permanent peace to earth is 
that every nation shall trust all other nations just as it 
wishes to be trusted by them. 

All that is needed to turn earth into Paradise is that every 
man shall think of his neighbor just as he wants his neigh- 
bor to think about him. That is the heart of the Golden 
Rule; that is the whole of the law and the prophets. 



96 



VI 

THE LORD GOD IS A SUN 



VI • 
THE LORD GOD IS A SUN 

Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for 
the eyes to behold the sun. — Eccl. 11 : 7. 

The Lord God is a sun. — Ps. 74 : 11. 

The writer of this ancient book of Ecclesiastes must 
have spent most of his days in a melancholy and pessimis- 
tic mood, but he has his lapses into cheerfulness, and we 
find him here in one of them. Even he can sometimes 
admit that the world is not all a fleeting show, that earth 
is not wholly a desert drear. " Truly," he cries, " the 
light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to 
behold the sun." The hopeful mood with him is fleeting; 
in the next verse the cloud comes back: "Yea, if a man live 
many years let him rejoice in them all; but let him remem- 
ber the days of darkness, for they shall be many." Is it 
not a dubious counsel? Why should one suffer himself in 
the days of good fortune to be dogged by the premoni- 
tion of coming ill? Of course trouble is coming, but the 
way to be ready for it is to take the good of the present 
hour. Let us listen rather to the word of the wisest teacher, 
who forbids us to worry about the future. " Be not 
anxious for the morrow! " Leave all that to God, and keep 
a trusting heart! 

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It is not, however, with the glooms of this pessimist 
that we are concerned this morning, but rather with the 
gleam of light which has broken into his darkness; with 
the admission which even he is forced to make: " Truly 
the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to 
behold the sun." 

Even this, we must not fail to admit, is not an absolute 
and unqualified truth. To behold the sun, by direct vision, 
is not a pleasant thing at all. When we look the sun in 
the face we are blinded. We need smoked glass. What 
this philosopher means is that it is a pleasant thing to be- 
hold the sunshine, spread over the face of the earth, lying 
like sifted gold dust on the green grass, reflected in the hues 
of the blossoms by the wayside, mingling with the soft 
mists that lie upon the tops of the forest on the mountain 
side, chasing the cloud shadows across the meadows, 
flashing from the ripples on the river, lighting up the 
smiles of happy human faces. A pleasant thing it is for 
the eyes to behold the sunshine. 

Yet even this is not always to our consciousness an 
absolute and undiluted good. There are days, even in this 
climate, when the sunshine is too much in evidence; when 
it is oppressive; when we are fain to seek the shade. The 
corn curls its leaves, the flowers wither in the borders, and 
men fall down in the street because the sunshine is more 
than they can bear. They tell us that in those regions 
where the skies are always cloudless, the perpetual glare 
of the sun becomes almost unendurable. " An Anglo- 

100 



THE LORD GOD IS A SUN 

Indian/ f says Dr. Griffith Jones, " retiring from the scorch- 
ing plains of the East, once told me that one of the reasons 
why the home-climate so speedily restored his balance 
was because of the escape it provided from the maddening 
monotony of cloudless weather. Strange as it may ap- 
pear to us, even sunshine may become an obsession, and 
faultless weather a noonday nightmare." 

There is a hymn of Dr. Doddridge which we used to 
sing, which tells us that we shall have, in heaven, 

" No midnight shade, no clouded sun, 
But sacred, high, eternal noon." 

Let us hope that it will not be quite so bad as that; that 

there will be cool shadows, and soft twilights, and even 

grateful darkness in which we may sometimes bathe our 

weary eyelids. I like Samuel Longfellow's way of putting 

it much better : — 

" O God, our Light, to thee we bow, 
Within all shadows standest thou; 
Give deeper calm than night can bring; 
Give sweeter songs than lips can sing." 

Thus we remind ourselves of the truth that no human 
values are absolute; that nothing is so perfect but that it 
becomes evil in disproportion. Light is good; it is the 
medium of vision, but too much light blinds us; it is only 
when it is mixed with shade that we can see. 

Yet our pessimist's concession is grandly true: " Light 
is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the 
sunshine." How great a good it is only those fully know 

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who have once enjoyed it, and from whom its blessed 
ministries have now been withdrawn. It is the one inclusive 
good of our physical experience. There are a few days in 
the year in which, in our climate, we find the sunshine 
overpowering; but the rule is that we rejoice in it. When 
we waken in the morning and see its golden flood pouring 
in at the window our hearts are glad, the day is well begun. 
We walk abroad in it, and our hopes are uplifted by its 
message of good cheer. How much the sunshine has to do 
with human happiness! The people in Southern California, 
where there is so much sunshine, seem to me to bear upon 
their faces the witness to its joy-bringing influence; they- 
appear to be happier than the people in more somber 
climate; they ought to be. 

But the sunshine gives us something better than a cheer- 
ful temperament. Rather, I should say, it brings us that 
which is the source of cheerful temperaments; it brings us 
health and life. Listen again to the Essayist who has 
started me on this study: " Every sunny day means an 
incalculable store of physical energy gathered up for the 
dark days of winter, to be let loose in myriad forms of 
labor, mechanical, intellectual and even spiritual, in other 
places by and by. The effect of clear light shining on the 
human frame is mysteriously tonic and rejuvenescent. 
Hygienists have invented the sun-bath for many forms of 
skin and even internal maladies. Wise people, however, 
do not wait for times of sickness to enjoy as many sun- 
baths as they can. For the sun's direct rays not only 

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THE LORD GOD IS A SUN 

quicken the normal vital forces in a marked manner, but 
are the sworn enemies of those subtle forms of bacillic 
life which are now known to be the active generators of 
disease. When we have learned to use our sunny hours as 
we ought, we shall have become once more a sturdy race 
of creatures. At present, what with our gloomy dwellings, 
our absurd costumes, covering up all but a few square 
inches of our skin-surface, and our sedentary habits, we 
are little better than cave-dwellers. Off with these stifling 
garments and out into the sunshine, good folk, if you would 
be well, if you would be physically happy and strong! " 

That counsel of this kind is good for many of us can 
hardly be doubted. We have before us now the promise of 
two or three months of sunshine; for the autumn days in 
this climate are the days when this good gift of God is 
bestowed most ungrudgingly. Let us rejoice in it, and 
gather and store the strength we shall need in the sullen 
days of midwinter. 

But the sunshine brings us not only joy and health, it is 
the source of all the mightiest energies by which our globe 
is made habitable. How much power there is in this — 
which as yet is almost wholly unutilized — no man can begin 
to calculate. We know, of course, that the energies locked 
in the coal beds, and the oil and gas measures are only the 
accumulations of sunshine, gathered up and condensed, and 
stored away for the use of man. It is the wealth that the 
sun was pouring into primeval swamps and morasses, 
hundreds of thousands of years before man made his ap- 

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THE INTERPRETER 

pearance on this planet, on which the world is now de- 
pending for light and heat. It is sunshine, released from 
its long imprisonment under ground, that glows in our 
grates and beams from our lamps today. 

Of course it does not need to be said that it is the sun- 
shine which awakens to life, and sustains in life, all things 
that grow out of the ground, and that thus provides the 
sustenance of life for all creatures that live upon the earth. 
The relation of the light and warmth of the sun to the 
tribes of living creatures is one of the primary facts of 
sentient existence. 

But what uncounted volumes of solar energy are coming 
to us now every year, in the direct rays of the sun. " We 
are told," says my essayist, once more, " that there is 
enough mechanical power running to waste in an hour's 
sunshine to drive all the steam engines and mills and motors 
of the world a thousand times over for a whole year. 
The heat falling in the tropics on a single square foot of 
surface has been estimated as the equivalent of one third of 
a horse-power. The force of Niagara itself would, on this 
basis, be matched by the sunshine streaming on a square 
mile or so. A steamship might be propelled by the heat that 
scorches its decks. Already solar machines are in use in 
Arizona and California, which do mechanical work at a 
remunerative rate. When this process has been mastered, 
we shall be independent of our coal beds, our windmills 
and water turbines and all other sources of energy, for we 
shall be able to tap the sun's power direct and at small cost. 

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THE LORD GOD IS A SUN 

What a future is this indicated for the arid Sahara, and the 
sun-scorched deserts of Persia, Arabia, and Australia ! " 

Is this a dream? I see no reason for so regarding it. 
The elements of probability are far greater than were those 
that ushered in the great discoveries of the telephone and 
the wireless telegraph and the Roentgen rays. And it 
appears to me that when we contemplate the sun as the 
direct source of a radiant energy which may be applied, 
in ways now unknown, to the supply of the primary human 
needs, we are in the presence of a possibility more moment- 
ous than anything which has yet taken form in the physical 
world. 

I suppose we shall all admit that there is no fact which 
concerns us as living creatures so much as this fact of the 
sunshine. It is the source of our joy, of our life, and of 
most of the manifold energies which we use in the fulfilment 
of our intelligent purposes on the earth. And the thought 
which confronts us this morning is, that great as have been 
the ministries to our lives hitherto of this benignant power, 
there are possibilities and promises of other and more 
wonderful bounties, of which we have hardly yet conceived. 

I suppose that the old poet must have been thinking 
about some of these things when he exclaimed " The Lord 
God is a sun!" Little, indeed, did he know of the magnitude 
or the marvellousness of the forces stored in the central orb 
of our system; the mighty astronomical facts which to us 
are commonplaces were far from his thought. If he had 
known what we know, his words would have had a far 

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larger meaning than they ever had for him. But he knew 
that the sunshine brought gladness and hope into the heart 
of man; he knew something of its relation to the springing 
life of the earth, and he was thinking of these benignant 
effects when he cried — " The Lord God is a sun! " Surely 
we can use his words with a comprehension of their signifi- 
cance to which he could not have attained. To him the 
sun, whose tent was the blue canopy overhead — which 
came out of the crimson pavilion of the morning as a 
bridegroom comes forth from his chamber, and rejoices 
as a strong man to run his course — this great monarch 
of the sky, moving in majesty from one end of the heaven 
to the other, scattering the shadows, sowing the fields with 
the seeds of life, making glad the heart of man and provid- 
ing him with the things needful for his life — was a symbol 
of that great unseen Power in whom he trusted, whose 
ministries to human needs filled his heart with thank- 
fulness. 

To us this great central source of joy and life and power, 
not only for our own world, but for all the planets of our 
system, if we take it as a symbol of the divine beneficence, 
must have a far more impressive meaning. For any man 
who knows the true relation of the sun to the earth, as 
the Psalmist did not know it, such a symbolism would have 
a vast significance. Yet I think that we should fail to tell 
the whole truth about it if we called it simply a symbol. 
Instead of saying " The ministry of the sun to the earth 
resembles the beneficence of God," we must rather say, 

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THE LORD GOD IS A SUN 

The ministry of the sun to the earth is the divine benefi- 
cence, part and parcel of it; these gifts of joy, of life, of 
power, are not like the gifts of God to men, they are the 
gifts of God to men; it is his joy that sparkles in the sun- 
shine; it is his life that thrills in our veins when the warm 
sun quickens our pulses ; it is his power that is poured forth 
in all this radiant energy. A pleasant thing it was for the 
eyes of this old philosopher, in his hours of insight, to be- 
hold the sunshine, for it was a symbol of the goodness of the 
divine Being; to us it ought to be a sublime and a glorious 
thing, for it is nothing else but the outpouring of the life of 
God in his direct ministry to human need — a ministry 
so large and so bountiful that no words of ours can tell its 
meaning. 

Our study of the sunshine has surely brought us in sight 
of some great truths, which we cannot now fully unfold. 
But there are two or three aspects of these truths to which 
I should like to draw your thought. 

In the first place we have before us an impressive il- 
lustration of the manner in which revelation grows. The 
sun, to the Psalmist, was a symbol ; but he had to take his 
own conception of the sun and let it teach him what it 
could of the nature of the Being whom he worshipped. 
If we use it as a symbol, how much more it tells us than it 
could have told him! We find our way, always, through 
Nature to God. And the greater is the Nature through 
which we pass on this quest, the greater must be the God 
whom we find behind it, or, within it. The enlarging con- 

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ceptions of the universe must enlarge and ennoble our 
thoughts of God. 

In the second place our study of the ministry of the sun- 
shine shows us not only what it has done already for the 
world in which we live, but opens to us hopes of greater 
bounties yet to be bestowed. Need I tell you that we are 
confronting here a proof of the divine nature of this minis- 
try? This is God's way of giving. Every gift makes room 
for a greater gift. This is the God you are praying to, 
trusting in, working with, beloved. He has done some 
great things for you, but there is always something better 
coming. If we fail to grasp this truth we miss the whole 
meaning of our relation to him. Before us, as individuals, 
working out the problems of character and service; be- 
fore us as a church, taking up the tasks that now summon 
us, there are new discoveries to record of the resources of 
the divine helpfulness, new adaptations to make of the 
infinite power by which all our work must be done. What 
our great Counsellor and Companion has done for us is 
little compared with what awaits us in his beneficent pur- 
pose ; for he is able to do for us exceeding abundantly above 
all that we can ask or think. 

In the third place there may be a hint for us, as spiritual 
beings, in the suggested discoveries of new energy to be 
taken directly from the sun's direct rays. What if it 
should turn out that a tremendous source of power had 
been waiting there for the children of men since the morn- 
ing of the Creation! That would only be the turning of 

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THE LORD GOD IS A SUN 

another leaf in the history of human development. That is 
what we have been doing from the beginning — appropriat- 
ing, one after another, the good things prepared for us 
from the foundation of the world, which we might have had 
sooner, if we had known enough to take them. If it should 
turn out that the heat and power that we need for our 
homes and our shops are waiting for us in the direct rays of 
the sun which has been shining over our heads all our lives 
and beckoning us to take his bounty, what a disclosure 
that would be to us of the truth that the greatest good of 
life is always nearer than we know ; that it is our own blind- 
ness and ignorance that keeps us from appropriating and 
enjoying it. That is quite as true in the spiritual as in the 
natural world, and it is a truth which this experience may 
help us to understand. 

In the fourth place there is comfort and inspiration for us 
in this truth that the Lord God is a sun, the source of light 
and joy, of life and power. The Psalmist and the pessimist 
rejoiced together in this assurance and we all do well to 
rejoice. In that great bounty we are all the sharers, and 
we ought to gather it up and store it in our hearts with 
thankfulness. 

But what is our relation to this central Source of light 
and life and power? Are we simply the recipients of his 
bounty? Do we take of his fullness as the grass and the 
flowers and the trees do, drawing his life into ourselves and 
letting it find its end in us? Or are we, like the planets, non- 
luminous bodies, reflecting the light of the central sun? 

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THE INTERPRETER 

We may, indeed, receive his life as the flowers do, and reflect 
his light as the planets do; but this is not, according to the 
Biblical conception, the completion of our relation to him. 
For souls, unlike flowers and planets, are kindred to the 
central Sun, the Lord and Giver of life. We are made in 
his image. We are partakers of his nature. We are 
sharers in his life. We have something more to do than to 
reflect his light, we have to live it, to reproduce it. We 
are not to be non-luminous bodies, receiving and absorbing 
the light; we are to be luminous bodies, centers and dis- 
pensers of radiant energy. That is our high calling of God 
in Christ Jesus. 

If the Lord God is a sun, we who are the children 
of God must be children of the light, which means that 
our natures are to radiate light and joy and life and 
power. That is what it means to live the Christian 
life in this world. 

Most of us, I fear, are too well content to be merely 
absorbents of sunshine. We take all we can get of the 
good of life and grumble because we get no more, having 
not much concern whether others share in it, and taking 
little pains to dispense to others the bounty we receive. 
That is not the manner of the Kingdom which Jesus came to 
establish here; for he who said of himself " I am the Light 
of the world," said to his disciples also, " Ye are the light of 
the world." When those who bear his name shall share 
his nature, live his life, enter into his joy, the world will be 
filled with the light of the knowledge of the glory of God 

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THE LORD GOD IS A SUN 

as it shone first, in the face of Jesus Christ, and now shines 
in their faces. 

Centers of radiant energy we are all to become. But 
how? This is not a condition into which we can put our- 
selves by any contriving or willing of our own. No man 
becomes a light in the world by saying, " Go to! let me 
shine ! " To become the possessors of such luminous power 
we need something more than choice and purpose, we need 
inspiration. The power is not ours, it comes from outside 
of and above ourselves. 

THING MORE " which th 

feels to be the unseen Source of all that is good in him. 
And it is in our reverent communing with this divine Spirit 
that the flame of sacred love is kindled in our hearts, by 
which our lives become centers of radiant energy. 

Some of you have heard President King speak, more 
than once, of the way into the great values of life; and 
have felt the emphasis which he places on the need of stay- 
ing in the presence of the best, in every sphere of value, till 
it has had a chance to get hold of you and stamp its image 
upon you. Stay in the presence of the best music, of the 
best art, and respond to its influence as best you can until 
you become familiar with it; read the best books patiently 
and receptively until there has been time for their mean- 
ing and their beauty to find their way into your thought, 
and make themselves at home there; above all, stay in the 
presence of the great personalities till the purity and sweet- 
ness and strength and charm of them have had a chance to 

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THE INTERPRETER 

put their spell upon you. Whose is the greatest Personality 
we need not argue here; most of us would agree. If we 
could stay in his presence, alone with him, not once in a 
while, but often; not for " a brief glance, a passing word," 
but for sacred hours of reverent thought, I doubt not we 
should often find the same thing happening to us that 
happened to the two who took a long walk with him one 
evening, not knowing who he was, and who said to each 
other when they had parted with him, " Did not our hearts 
burn within us as he talked with us by the way? " That 
is the fire which lights up hope and love in human hearts. 
I don't care very much what your theories about Jesus 
Christ are, but I know that if you will stay in his presence 
long enough to let the mind that was in him get a chance to 
permeate your thought, and the love that was in him to 
weave its spell about your heart, others will find, if you do 
not, that you are becoming a center of radiant energy; 
that from your life into theirs are flowing light and joy and 
life and power. 



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VII 
THE ELIXIR 



VII 
THE ELIXIR 

Passing through the valley of Weeping they make it a place of springs, 
yea, the early rain cover eth it with blessings. — Ps. 84 : 6. 

The people here described are those " in whose heart are 
the highways." " To Zion " the translators suggest. A 
much more poetic interpretation is that of Dr. Alexander, 
that these " highways in the heart " are the open com- 
munications with the spiritual realm. These are the 
people in whose inner life the paths by which prayers as- 
cend and inspirations descend are not tangled ways and by- 
paths, but wide and free thoroughfares, so that between 
themselves and the Source of all wisdom and goodness 
there is always direct and free intercourse. 

The light and love of that superior realm with which we 
ought always to be in the closest relations, thus flow into 
their lives and fill them with the abundance of peace. 

What we are now concerned with is the effect produced 
by such lives upon their surroundings. " Passing through 
the Vale of Weeping," says the Psalmist, " they make it a 
Place of Springs; yea the early rain covereth it with bless- 
ings." " The Vale of Weeping — or Baca " — apparently 
is a sterile and forbidding tract where the pools are salty 
and the banks verdureless; where external nature is desti- 

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THE INTERPRETER 

tute of beauty and charm. Or, as suggested by the second 
phrase, the conditions are like those which prevail in the 
Orient or in California after the long rainless summer, 
when vegetation has disappeared and the country is a 
parched desert. To such a land the " early rain " is the 
symbol of all reviving and restoring influences. The 
change in the face of the earth which is caused by the rain 
that comes to Palestine in November, brings with it the 
renewal of life and hope and happiness to men. It seems 
like a new world, like a resurrection. The prophet in 
setting forth the refreshing and reinvigorating effect of 
the teaching of the truth, can find no finer emblem than 
this: "For as the rain cometh down and the snow from 
heaven, and returneth not thither but watereth the earth 
and maketh it to bring forth and bud that it may give seed 
to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be 
that goeth forth out of my mouth." And the description 
of the reign of the Prince of Peace in the seventy-second 
Psalm takes up the same similitude: " He shall come down 
like rain upon the mown grass, as showers that water the 
earth." Could anything better than this be said of the 
administration of a civic power over any people — that 
its effect upon their social life was like that of a refreshing 
rain upon parched and thirsty fields? 

Such, in the figure of the Psalmist, is the nature of the 
influence shed abroad upon the world around them by 
these men and women in whose heart are the highways that 
keep communication open between this world of sense and 

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THE ELIXIR 

that world of spirit that lies so close alongside it. Their 
very presence in the earth turns arid plains into gardens; 
transforms the salt pools into life-giving springs; clothes 
the brown and barren hillsides with fresh verdure. 

Shall we say that this is a figure of speech? It is rather 
more than that. For when the life of the Spirit does get 
possession of a man and shapes all his conduct, it is almost 
certain that physical nature round about him will show some 
signs of its presence. Always when the Spirit is poured 
upon us from on high the wilderness becomes a fruitful 
field, and the fruitful field is counted for a forest. Nature 
itself rejoices when man comes into his birthright and knows 
himself to be one of the sons of God. 

What I want to consider with you is the transforming 
effect upon all our surroundings of this spiritual principle. 
The truth is one that is set forth in a book which I have 
been reading, in a chapter called " The Personalizing of 
Life." 1 The argument of the book is that the first duty of 
man is to realize his own personality — to come to himself. 
Personality is something more than individuality. A tree 
or a flower or an animal may be an individual; only a being 
possessed of self-consciousness, unity, freedom, and moral 
sense can be called a person. Then there are human beings 
whose individuality is strongly developed, but whose 
personality is defective. They are quite sufficiently 
marked off from the mass of humanity, they possess a 
certain amount of egoistic initiative, they push their 

*By James W. Buckman, D.D. 

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THE INTERPRETER 

own interests vigorously enough in their contact with 
their kind, but they are far from possessing those 
higher spiritual qualities which make a man a true 
personality. 

What is the " True Self " ? The true self, one author 
answers, " is the unselfish self, the self that is greatest and 
yet least individualistic. It is me, yet not mine. The 
instant one attempts to monopolize his True Self, to make 
it his and his only, particular and possessed, it is gone. 
Only the empirical, individualistic self remains. For this 
True Self is universal. It is conscious of itself only as 
related to God and to other selves. . . . The True Self, 
so to speak, secretes goodness as a nautilus secretes its shell, 
and this secretion is Character. . . . The struggle for 
character is the supreme struggle of life — a struggle, not 
with others, but within oneself. Say what one will of 
the struggle for bread, the struggle for wealth, the struggle 
for pleasure — the struggle for character is the most wide- 
spread, the most intense, the most absorbing and the 
most worth while of any human interest in this or in 
any age. 

" Slowly, but certainly, with many forgettings and re- 
coverings, with many disloyalties and redevotions, men 
and women are coming more and more clearly to catch the 
vision of the True Self within which is the center of all true 
judgments and appraisals, and to honor character which 
enshrines it. In our finer moments, ' our seasons of calm 
weather/ we ' feel the immortal youth ' of the True Self 

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THE ELIXIR 

within and know that while we are leal to that, no loss 
or defeat can come to us, but only immortal gain and 
progress." 

I have given you these liberal citations from this interest- 
ing book because I want to get before you as well as I can 
the nature of that True Self, which is the thing that each 
one of us in his best moments cares for most. It is this 
True Self which always keeps the highways open into the 
higher realms. And now I want to reflect with you upon 
the effect which this True Self, when it becomes enthroned 
in any life, exerts upon all the features of that life, its habits, 
its surroundings, its outward form and costume, how it 
transforms and transfigures them. 

I have named my theme " The Elixir," because the 
alchemists believed in a fabulous substance which, stirred 
into molten lead or silver, would change them to pure gold. 
Some such vision of a magical transforming agency still 
haunts the dreams of imaginative physicists. We shall 
look for it in vain in the laboratories, but the thing which it 
prefigures is no novelty. This is precisely the office of 
spiritualized personalities, to re-create all nature with 
which they come in contact, to transform and refine and 
beautify the whole of life. 

Let me speak first of the imaginative contemplation of 
nature which finds in her a response to our own feelings of 
admiration and of awe. The poet always personalizes 
nature. In her aspects and moods there is something that 
he feels to be kindred with himself; something with which 

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THE INTERPRETER 

he can hold communion. In the words of one of our own 
American singers : — 

" The bubbling brook doth laugh when I come by 
Because my feet find measure with its call; 
The birds know when the friend they love is nigh, 
For I am known to them both great and small; 
The flower that on the lonely hillside grows 
Expects me then when spring its bloom has given; 
And many a tree and bush my wanderings know 
And e'en the clouds and silent stars of heaven; 
For he who with his Maker walks aright 
Shall be their lord, as Adam was before; 
His ear shall catch each sound with new delight, 
Each object wear the dress that then it wore; 
And he, as when erect in soul he stood, 
Hear from his Father's lips that all is good." 

Wordsworth is, of course, the high priest of this revela- 
tion, though all the great ones share it. Not only in " The 
Prelude " and " The Excursion " and " Tintern Abbey," 
but everywhere in his verse is the utterance of this con- 
sciousness of something in the world about him that is 
kindred to his spirit; that calls forth and sustains his 
higher emotions; that fills him with its peace. So in " The 
Prelude" he tells of the experience of his boyhood: 

" Then while the days flew by and years passed on, 
From Nature and her overflowing soul 
I had received so much, that all my thoughts 
Were steeped in feelings; I was only then 
Contented, when, with bliss ineffable, 
I felt the sentiment of Being spread 
O'er all that moves and all that seemeth still; 
O'er all that, lost beyond the reach of thought 
And human knowledge, to the human eye 

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THE ELIXIR 

Invisible, yet liveth to the heart; 

O'er all that leaps and runs and shouts and sings 

Or beats the gladsome air: o'er all that glides 

Beneath the wave, yea in the wave itself, 

And mighty depth of waters. Wonder not 

If high the transport, great the joy I felt 

Communing in this sort through earth and heaven 

With every form of creature, as it looked 

Towards the Uncreated with a countenance 

Of adoration, with an eye of love. 

One song they sang, and it was audible, 

Most audible, then, when the fleshly ear 

O'ercome by humblest prelude of that strain, 

Forgot her functions, and slept undisturbed." 

Thus it is that the pure soul, the True Self, invests the 
natural world with divine significance; beholds reflected 
from it a light that never was on sea or land. Is this 
mere fancy? Is it not a deep insight, — the realization of 
the beatitude that the pure in heart shall see God? Is not 
the imagination here, as always, the organ of revelation? 

But I must come down to homelier aspects of our theme. 
For it is not only true that the spiritual mind gives the 
world about us a new and nobler seeming and enables us 
to discern in it meanings and glories which else were hidden ; 
it is also true that it works actual changes in things; that 
those who have been transformed by the renewing of their 
minds, themselves proceed to transform their surroundings. 
As men ascend from mere individualities, to become true 
personalities, the fact is reflected in the very order and 
manner of their life; it is refined and beautified; it is made 
orderly and sweet and winsome. 

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THE INTERPRETER 

" Consider, for instance/' says our author, " how the 
primal instinctive functions essential to the maintenance of 
life have been gradually uplifted and consecrated by the 
touch of personality. Eating, for example, at first so 
desperately animal and matter of fact, — sans table, sans 
dishes, sans plates and knives and forks, sans manners, 
sans everything, — how it has been personalized! From 
the helter-skelter, hand to mouth gobbling of the unwashed 
barbarian estate to snowy damask, silver service, French 
china, and grace before meat, is a transformation that only 
the persistent demand for an outer comeliness to match 
that inherent something we call personality could have 
accomplished. . . . Still more significant is the spiritualiz- 
ing of the sexual relation in the sacredness of marriage, 
with solemn pledge and holy rite and life-long loyalty — 
thus making the home the very shrine and center of per- 
sonal values and spiritual culture. So completely and 
beautifully has the true home been personalized that every- 
thing within it and about it has a spiritual aspect. Every 
movement of the daily round — which is thus no longer a 
round but a circle of symmetry — every picture on the 
wall, every rug on the floor, every book on the table and 
article in the work-basket, every toy in the nursery, every 
tree on the lawn and flower in the garden, is touched with 
the transfiguring light of personality — what is more 
magical than the effect of a woman's touch? — so that the 
whole has become a very temple of the human spirit. As 
such it is less a creation of hand and eye than of mind and 

122 



THE ELIXIR 

soul, a fabric of beauty and harmony made according to the 
pattern in the Mount." 

Such is the effect when the true elixir vitae is poured 
over domestic life. All that makes our homes beautiful 
and dear is due to this transforming influence. And the 
practical truth is that each one of us ought to be the center 
and source of the same kind of transforming influence. 
We ought to be the kind of people who, when we pass 
through the Vale of Weeping, make it a place of springs; 
at whose coming, like that of the early rain, the parched 
and dreary tracts of our common life spring into freshness 
and beauty. 

►I will not dwell on the contrast which these words sug- 
gest to every one of you. All of us know people who turn 
every green and pleasant land through which they pass into 
a desert; who change the fresh springs of good will and 
kindness by the wayside into salt pools of bitterness and 
suspicion. There are men and women with whom you 
cannot talk long without thinking a little worse of yourself 
and everybody else ; who cannot live long in any neighbor- 
hood without stirring up jealousy and strife, whose whole 
effect upon the life about them tends to deform and dis- 
figure and deprave. I will not dwell on this side of the 
picture, I say; I only sketch in this bit of background that 
we may see more clearly the contrasted characters on which 
we are trying to fix our eyes. 

For we have surely known many others whose influence 
on the life round about them is just the reverse of this. 

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THE INTERPRETER 

They make the world pleasanter and roomier and more 
habitable wherever they go; they draw together those that 
are estranged; they kindle the enthusiasms that fill life 
with hope and courage; they transform the dreariest 
commonplaces into enlivening thoughts. The best of 
these effects are not wrought of any set purpose. These 
people are not trying to impart such influences; they are 
quite oblivious of them. Those who turn the Vale of Baca* 
into a well do not go there for the purpose of changing the 
climate and improving the water supply; it happens while 
they are " passing through " the valley; it radiates from 
their persons; it is unconscious influence. It is because 
they are what they are that such effects follow; not because 
they are going about to produce them. 

If your life and mine were filled with this transforming 
power, I wonder where it would be likely to reveal 
itself. Where would the signs be seen of its vitalizing 
touch? 

It ought to be visible first in the places where we spend 
the most time. This magic is nowhere more potent than 
near the hearthstone. Those in whose hearts are the high- 
ways are apt to make the home the most beautiful place on 
earth. Where else are the influences of a gracious 
personality so strongly felt, so lovingly treasured? We all 
understand this, and I do not need to dwell upon it. We 
are all acquainted with homes in which such personalities 
have shed abroad their sacred influence, refining, cheering, 
ennobling, till a fragrant presence pervades them, 

124 



THE ELIXIR 

" Like vials full of odors sweet 
And harps of sweeter sound." 

But the place where this transforming touch is needed 
most is the work-a-day world. That seems, it must be 
confessed, an unpromising realm for the radiation of 
influences like these. In the noise and the dust, the smoke 
and the grime of factory or mill or mine; in the push and 
rush of office or counting room; in the strife of class with 
class, and the struggle of union with non-union, there 
seems to be little room for this subtle force of a 
spiritualized personality to make itself felt. One thinks of 
Mark Twain's quaint conceit, — of the inadequacy of an 
ounce of attar of roses to sweeten a glue factory. 

Nevertheless, the case is by no means as hopeless as it 
seems. The men and women in whose hearts are the 
highways, never pass through this sordid precinct without 
leaving some trace of their presence. It may not always be 
visible to men but the angels see it. There is many an 
employer who never forgets that he is a gentleman when he 
is talking with an employee; who never fails to recognize 
the manhood of the man with whom he is dealing; and the 
contact of a few minutes with such a man often changes 
the salty pool in some workingman's heart to a fountain 
of the water of life. It is quite possible to fill a smoky and 
noisy factory with the aroma of good will; to make its air 
vibrant with the spirit of justice and fairness and honor 
which finds expression in all its administration. 

But all this is a purely personal influence ; there is no 

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THE INTERPRETER 

machinery about it; no preamble and resolutions; no 
constitution and by-laws; it is just the touch of 
life upon life; the radiation of friendship from a 
heart of good will. There are people who cannot jostle 
you in a crowd without conveying by the touch their 
friendliness. " A lady turning a corner in London, so the 
story goes, ran against a little street ragamuffin. She 
stopped and with genuineness and grace begged his pardon. 
The little chap took off his cap and said with a smile: 
1 You have my parding, Miss, and you're welcome to it. 
And, say, the next time you run agin' me you can knock 
me clean down and I won't say a word.' Turning to another 
boy when she was gone, he added, ' I say, Jim, it's 
fine havin' some one askin' yer parding, ain't it?' " Just 
a drop of the elixir had touched this poor boy's heart. 
Mr. Buckham tells another story which illustrates another 
phase of it. "At Hofod [in Wales] on December 16, 1904, 
Evan Robert told how the revival reached him. One 
evening, while at Langhor, he walked from his home down 
to the Post Office and on his way passed a gypsy woman 
who saluted him with ' Good evening, sir.' Her use of 
' sir ' in addressing a mere miner went straight to his 
heart (they use that appellative much more sparingly in 
the old country than we do here) and he asked himself 
why he had not said ' Good evening, madam,' to the gypsy. 
1 From that moment,' he says, ' I felt that my heart was 
full of the divine love, and that I could love the whole world, 
irrespective of color or creed or nationality.' " Just a 

126 



THE ELIXIR 

kind word from the lips of a gypsy woman, falling upon the 
ear of a miner. What did it do for him? It flashed upon 
him a great truth. It invested him with manhood. 
The elixir of life was in the love that prompted that word. 

So that we need not wait for the poets or the prophets or 
the leaders of business or of society to set this force in 
motion. "The word is nigh thee "; no matter how humble 
thou mayest be. Speak it out, and let its saving grace go 
forth. It is open to all of us, as that noble hymn of George 
Herbert admonishes us, to distil this elixir from the com- 
monplaces of our work-day life. 

" All may of Thee partake, 
Nothing can be so mean, 
Which with this tincture (for thy sake) 
Will not grow bright and clean. 

" A servant, with this clause 
Makes drudgery divine: 
Who sweeps a room as for thy laws 
Makes that and the action fine. 

" This is the famous stone 
That turneth all to gold; 
For that which God doth touch and own 
Cannot for less be told." 



127 



VIII 
A NEW HEART FOR THE NATION 



VIII 
A NEW HEART FOR THE NATION 

Cast away from you all your transgressions wherein ye have transgressed, 
and make you a new heart and a new spirit, for why will ye die, house 
of Israel? For I have no pleasure in the death of him that dieth, saith 
the Lord God; wherefore turn yourselves and live ye. — Ezek. 18 : 31, 32. 

These are familiar words. We have been hearing them, 
all our lives, in the revival meetings. We have always 
heard them used as the call to repentance of the individual 
sinner, — as the proof of the need of the regeneration of the 
individual sinner, — as the threat of the doom of eternal 
death to the individual sinner. We have always understood 
them as a message addressed by a merciful God to the 
individual sinner. 

Such use of them, by a principle of accommodation and 
analogy, is admissible. They do set forth the principles on 
which God deals with individual sinners. They do convey 
to us the message of individual salvation. The preachers 
and the evangelists have not misused them when they 
have applied them to this purpose. But it would have 
been well if they had always made it plain that this is not 
the primary application of the words. Primarily these 
words were addressed, not to individuals, but to a people, 
a nation. The words themselves are perfectly explicit 

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THE INTERPRETER 

on this point. " Make you a new heart and a new spirit; 
for why will ye die, house of Israel f " This phrase 
" house of Israel," is applied in this prophecy a great many 
scores of times to the Jewish nation. The commission 
which this prophet Ezekiel received, at the beginning of his 
ministry, was this: " Son of man, go and speak my word 
unto the house of Israel." It was to the people in their 
collective capacity that his message was to be spoken. 
The nation was to be called to repent; to turn from the 
evil of its ways; to get a new heart and a new spirit. The 
prophet often illustrates the national sin and the national 
repentance by the sin and the repentance of an individual; 
but it is the nation that he is dealing with primarily; it is 
to the national consciousness that he is making his appeal; 
it is the national reformation that he is preaching from the 
beginning of the book to the end of it. He personalizes 
the nation ; he conceives of it as a moral personality, with 
moral ideals, and moral purposes and moral responsibilities, 
and as such he delivers to it the word of God with which 
he has been entrusted. 

While, therefore, the evangelists have been justified in 
making use of his words to enforce the need of individual 
repentance and conversion, the need of the individual to 
make himself a new heart and a new spirit, — the central and 
primary truth of the prophecy is the need of national re- 
pentance and conversion; the need of the nation to make 
itself a new heart and a new spirit. If these words of 
Ezekiel have any significance for us, their application is 

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A NEW HEART FOR THE NATION 

first of all to the life and character of the nation. They not 
only justify us in saying, they require us to say, that 
a nation may repent and be converted; that a nation may 
need a new heart and may get a new heart. 

You say that a nation is composed of individuals, and 
that is true; but there is a community of thought and 
feeling, a consensus of judgment, which prevails in every 
people, and by which the ideas and choices of individuals 
are largely formed and guided. We call it public opinion, 
and we truly say that the force which normally controls a 
democracy is public opinion. In one sense it is true that 
public opinion is wholly made up of the opinions of in- 
dividuals; in another sense it is equally true that the opin- 
ions of individuals are largely formed by the influence upon 
them of public opinion. Thus the community comes to 
have common thoughts and feelings and purposes; to have 
an intellectual and moral atmosphere, a character, a spirit 
which every individual breathes and by which the life of 
every individual is more or less affected. And this prevail- 
ing influence is sometimes good and sometimes evil; some- 
times tends to life and growth and sometimes to death and 
destruction. Public opinion is sometimes vital and vigor- 
ous and salutary, and sometimes, the words of Isaiah, 
addressed to the Commonwealth of Israel, more truthfully 
describe it: " The whole head is sick and the whole heart 
faint; from the sole of the foot even to the head there is 
no soundness in it." 

Thus there is need of such words as these that the prophet 

133 



THE INTERPRETER 

Ezekiel is speaking in the text to the house of Israel, calling 
to repentance and renovation of life; calling not only for 
the casting away of transgressions and the reformation of 
evil practises, but for a new heart and a new spirit, a new 
public opinion, a new social atmosphere, a new direction of 
the common ideas and the common choices of men. 

I suppose that such a call is always sounding forth from 
the seats of authority; that there is never an hour in the 
life of any nation when the summons to repentance and the 
renewal of life would not be heard, if there were ears to 
hear. In the life of every nation as in the life of every man, 
there are always old evils to put away and new inspirations 
to welcome. But there are times in the life of a people as 
in the life of a person when this call becomes articulate and 
commanding; when it seems clear that no mere patching 
and mending will do, but that a thorough renovation of the 
national life is called for. And such a word, it seems to me, 
is being spoken to our nation in this hour. And not to our 
nation only, but to all the nations. It is a day when some 
radical changes in human affairs are called for; when, in 
some large sense old things are to be put away and all 
things are to become new. To our own nation, however, 
this summons just now seems urgent, and it is the exigency 
which confronts us that I desire to consider. 

Lest you may be disturbed by the fear that you are going 
to be treated to a discussion of current political or partizan 
issues, let me assure you that they are not in my mind. I 
am thinking of something deeper than the problems of 

134 



A NEW HEART FOR THE NATION 

political method; it is not of the machinery of parties or of 
administrations that I want you to think, but of the heart 
of the nation, of the spirit of our national life. 1 

That something is wrong with this seems to be evident 
to most of us. Outwardly we are in very good condition. 
The crops are exceptionally good, the railroads are busy, 
trade is fair, we hear of few commercial failures; against 
all the traditions and all the predictions, this turbulent 
presidential year has been notably a year of prosperity. 
But in spite of all this we are not so happy or so hopeful 
as we ought to be. What is the trouble? " The crisis 
in the political situation of America," says a thoughtful 
observer, " after years of agitation and growing discontent, 
means really that popular government has been tested and 
found wanting in the great business of informing society 
upon a large scale with the spirit of economic and social 
justice." If that is true, it is a serious condition. If 
popular government has failed in this respect; if it has not 
inspired the people with the spirit of economic and social 
justice, the failure is indeed portentous; and the sense of 
unrest and solicitude which does, no doubt, lie heavily on 
the hearts of thoughtful men and women, is not to be 
wondered at. What shall we say about it? Is it true? 

Let us test the matter by getting the judgment of classes 
upon each other. The great cleavage in an industrial 
society like ours is between the wage-payers and the wage- 
earners. What do the wage-payers think about the wage- 

1 This sermon was preached, Oct. 26, 1912. 

135 



THE INTERPRETER 

earners? Do they find them to be inspired with the spirit 
of economic and social justice? Do employers, as a class, 
feel confident that laborers, as a class, are disposed to be 
fair and equitable and reasonable in their dealings with 
their employers? We are constantly hearing testimony to 
the contrary. The general opinion of employers seems 
to be that workmen, as a class, are inclined to shirk and 
soldier; that they are constantly trying to get the advantage 
of their employers, to crowd them into a corner; to extort 
from them unreasonable compensation for their work; 
that they are constantly becoming more unreliable, more 
discontented, more troublesome. There are exceptions, 
of course, among them, all the employers would say; 
but this is the general tendency of the working class. 
If we take the testimony of the various employers' class 
journals, that is the general condition. And I am inclined 
to believe that there is a good deal of truth in these testi- 
monies. I do not believe that the attitude of the working 
class toward their work and toward their employers is all 
that it ought to be. I think that the most fair-minded 
employers have a great deal to endure from the unfairness 
and dishonesty and ill nature and bad faith of the people 
who work for them. But if they are anywhere near 
right in this, then it seems to be pretty clear that our 
democracy has not succeeded in inspiring this largest 
class of our population with the spirit of economic and 
social justice. 

And now let us ask the working men what they have 

136 



A NEW HEART FOR THE NATION 

to say about their employers. Do they find them to be 
inspired with the spirit of economic and social justice? 
Not uniformly — if we may credit their testimony. 
It is not needful to repeat it ; I will not pain your ears with 
the recital. Reasonable workingmen recognize the fact 
that there are employers who are disposed to treat them 
with entire justice; but the general opinion of the working 
class is that the employing class is bound to get the lion's 
share of the products of industry; and, as a rule, wherever 
it can, that it lengthens the day and increases the task and 
lessens the wage — crowding the workman down to the 
verge of starvation or over it. And I am bound to say 
that the careful investigations which have been made into 
the conditions of the laboring classes in such centers as 
Pittsburgh and Bethlehem and Lawrence, give some strong 
confirmation of the workingman's judgment. But if it is 
true, then we must admit that our democracy has signally 
failed to inspire the other section of our industrial society 
with the spirit of economic and social justice. 

Suppose we ask the private citizens as a class what they 
think about the office-holding class. All intelligent citizens 
would say that no sweeping statements can be made; that 
there are many faithful, intelligent, conscientious, efficient 
office holders; but the general consensus of opinion would 
be that there is a strong tendency among men in public 
office to multiply sinecures and perquisites; to shorten 
hours and lighten tasks; to get a good deal more money 
for their services than they could expect to get in private 

137 



THE INTERPRETER 

positions, and to exercise a great deal less vigilance and 
economy in working for the public than they would exercise 
in working for themselves. That is the popular belief, and 
I think that there are some grounds for it. 

But what would the people in office say, if they were 
questioned, about the people out of office? I have heard 
them, a good many times, complain bitterly that the people 
out of office are grossly neglectful of their duties, and greedy 
in their relations to the Commonwealth; that the great 
majority of them, in dealing with the city or the state, 
expect to get a good deal more than market price for their 
wares; that a great many of them are very unwilling to 
assume any personal responsibility for good citizenship; 
that most so-called good citizens are more inclined to find 
fault with the people in office than they are to encourage 
and support them in the performance of their duty; that, 
in short, the average citizen is much more concerned to get 
as much as he can out of the Commonwealth, than to con- 
tribute his full share of service to its support. 

Now if anything like this is true it would seem that the 
relation to the Commonwealth, both of the people in office 
and of the people out of office, is far from what it ought to 
be; that there is a great lack of the spirit of social and 
economic justice on both sides of this relation. And 
without further analysis, I am sure that we shall be con- 
strained to admit the truth of the statement from which we 
started, that our " popular government has been tested and 
found wanting in the great business of informing society 

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A NEW HEART FOR THE NATION 

upon a large scale with the spirit of social and economic 
justice." And yet this would seem to be the " great busi- 
ness " of popular government. If we have a kind of 
government which fails here, something serious must be the 
matter with it. What is the matter? 

I think it is nothing less than this. The people have 
failed to grasp the essential attribute of rulership. The 
people are the rulers, but they have never yet got hold of 
the real meaning and spirit of rulership. 

What constitutes a good ruler? It is the capacity and 
the passion for disinterested, unselfish service. No man 
who lacks that quality can be a good ruler. You know 
what Jesus said about that : "He that would be great among 
you shall be your servant, and he that is chief shall be 
servant of all." "You call me Lord and Master," he said, 
" and so I am; but I am among you as one that serveth." 
That is the business of a king or a magistrate. That is 
the very foundation of the right to rule. About that, 
since Jesus spoke, there has been no doubt among men of 
insight. Most of the chief rulers of Christendom clearly 
recognize this truth. Some of them do not live up to it 
very well, but all of them declare it to be their purpose. 
Any monarch in Christendom who proclaimed that the 
political power was his and that he meant to use it for his 
own aggrandizement, — to look out for himself, first of all, — 
would be hurled from his throne before he was a month 
older. There can be no question about it, — the first 
qualification of a ruler is the capacity and the passion of 

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THE INTERPRETER 

service. From all suspicion of egoistic motive he must 
keep himself free. 

Now when, as in a democracy, the rulership is distributed 
among the people, this capacity and passion for unselfish 
service must go along with the power. It matters not how 
many or how few the rulers are, this spirit must be in them 
all. If the main business of the rulers is looking out for 
themselves, then the more there are of them the worse the 
government will be. 

If the power of government should be handed down from 
a king whose function was unselfish service, to a people all 
of whom, or most of whom, accepted it selfishly, either 
shirking the exercise of it whenever they could, or using 
it mainly for their own profit, the democracy thus created 
would be no gain over monarchy; it would be a vast and 
fearful loss. 

Now I fear that we, the people of the United States, have 
accepted our sovereignty without any clear comprehension 
of the altruistic purpose, the purpose of service, which 
sovereignty implies. It is not true of all of us, I hope; 
but is it not true of most of us? Do we use the franchise 
as though it were a call to unselfish service? Considering 
the matter as we must, collectively, have we as a people 
conducted our government as though it was our ruling 
purpose to serve the common weal? Have we so conducted 
our government as to inform and inspire the people with 
the spirit of social and economic justice? Are our govern- 
ments in city and state and nation apt to be of such a 

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A NEW HEART FOR THE NATION 

character that those who are brought into contact with 
them, — young or old, — find the wish and the purpose 
kindled in them to render to all men their dues, — to do 
as they would be done by, — to spend and be spent in 
unselfish service? 

I fear that we cannot in any large sense claim any such 
thing for ourselves as rulers. I fear that in politics, as in 
business, we have generally assumed that every man would 
look out sharply first for his own interest — that this in- 
deed was his primary duty; and that if all men did this, 
giving themselves little or no concern for the common weal, 
a wise Providence, combining and overruling all these in- 
dividual selfishnesses, would work out a beneficent result. 
Something like that is the social philosophy on which our 
political and economic society has been built. 

It now seems to be clear that this wisdom has not been 
wholly justified by her children. There does not appear 
to be any supernatural alembic in which aggregations of 
individual egoism are transmuted into a collective altru- 
ism. On the contrary our experience shows that a society 
in which individuals are encouraged to look out sharply 
for their own interests, political and industrial, and to give 
themselves no particular concern for the common good, 
will be a society in which there will be no social coherence; 
in which envy and suspicion and ill-will will prevail; in 
which there will be a plentiful lack of the spirit of economic 
and social justice. Such a result seems to be natural and 
inevitable. What the nation soweth that shall it also reap. 

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THE INTERPRETER 

The spirit of discontent, of smouldering enmity and antag- 
onism, which darkens our sky and threatens our peace, 
breaking out, now and then, in tumult and riot, is the legiti- 
mate fruit of the social philosophy by which we have been 
trying to guide our lives. 

It is the heart of the nation that is thus disturbed and 
embittered. And the heart of the nation is sore because 
it has been transgressing the law of its own being. It has 
been trying to build up a social organism by the use of 
unsocial forces. It has been putting its trust in the 
beneficence of selfishness, when it ought to have known 
that the law of all life is love. It must have known 
that a king could only rule by serving his people, 
but it has imagined that a democracy could rule if 
every ruler served himself. That is its sin, — the sin 
which has brought upon it discontent and trouble and 
confusion and fear. 

What is the remedy? It is not distinctly named in any 
of the recent political platforms. It is far more radical 
than any thing which any of the politicians have proposed. 
It is not the suppression, by force, of discontent. It is 
not well-drilled militia and Gatling guns. It is a costly 
peace that is purchased at such a price — a peace that is no 
peace. 

It is not the reorganization of political machinery and 
of the methods of production. It is not, let me say, the 
remedy of Socialism, — of the kind of socialism which 
puts its trust in economic readjustments. There are 

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A NEW HEART FOR THE NATION 

Socialists, no doubt, who are fully aware that something 
deeper is needed than a reorganization of the methods of 
distribution. But the ordinary remedies on which the 
current Socialistic propaganda puts the emphasis do not 
go to the heart of the matter. For when rent and interest 
and profit are all eliminated, you still have left the un- 
disciplined human desire which knows no limit. " Social- 
ism in essence," says a penetrating thinker, " is not so much 
a promise of satisfaction as a call for self-restraint. Far 
from satisfying us automatically by giving us all we want, 
or all we think we ought to have, the chief function of a 
socialistic state would be precisely that of imposing just 
limits on our desires. Are we ready for these limitations? 
No covetous community could bear the socialistic yoke 
for a day. In promoting Socialism we are invoking a sys- 
tem of authority which will put restraints on all classes 
precisely at that point where hitherto no class has shown 
itself willing to put restraints on itself. . . . The ques- 
tion is not whether the system is good enough for the 
people, but whether the people are good enough for 
the system." 

" No covetous community could bear the Socialistic 
yoke for a day." It is because all our communities are 
essentially covetous communities — eager to get more — 
every man pushing his own interest — that discontent is 
rife and our peace is threatened. It is just simple, plain, 
old-fashioned selfishness that is the matter with us, nothing 
else. .That is the malady from which we are suffering. 

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THE INTERPRETER 

That is the sin whose retribution is now scourging us. 
That is the sin from which the nation needs to be saved. 
And the prophet's word to this nation today is just this 
word : Cast away from you your selfishness, and make you 
a new heart and a new spirit, for why will ye die, O American 
nation? You cannot build your national life on the founda- 
tions of selfishness. You cannot live and prosper by the 
rule of every man for himself. That is the way of death 
for nations as well as for men. Least of all forms of govern- 
ment can a democracy thrive under an egoistic regime. 
All the people can rule only on condition that all the people 
serve. If all the people are habitually seeking their 
own, strifes, feuds, oppression, insurrections will tear your 
democracy to fragments. 

The most profound treatise on Democracy that this 
nation has yet produced — Mr. Croly's " Promise 
of American Life," — gives us on its last pages a 
statement of fundamental truth which we do well to 
ponder : 

" It is very easy and in a sense perfectly true to declare 
that democracy needs for its fulfilment a peculiarly high 
standard of moral behavior; and it is even more true to 
declare that a democratic scheme of moral values reaches 
its consummate expression in the religion of human brother- 
hood. . . . The task of individual and social regeneration 
must remain incomplete and impoverished until the con- 
viction and the feeling of brotherhood enters into possession 
of the human spirit. " 

144 



A NEW HEART FOR THE NATION 

This is not the dictum of a doctor of divinity, it is the 
verdict of a master of political science. 

Does not the prophet's scorching message come home to 
us today with power? Is not this, my fellow countrymen, 
the word we need to hear and lay to heart? I tell you that 
it is a solemn word, an urgent word. What this nation 
chiefly needs is not more laws or more political or industrial 
machinery; it needs a new heart, a new spirit, a new ruling 
motive. It needs a public opinion saturated with the spirit 
of social justice. It needs rulers, — and by rulers I mean 
first of all voters, — whose hearts are warm with the 
spirit of service. 

We say sometimes that the cure for the evils of democ- 
racy is more democracy, but this does not mean more 
competition; it means more brotherhood. So far as our 
land is concerned, if there is religion enough among us to 
fill the heart of this democracy with the spirit of brother- 
hood, we can save the nation. 

Do I speak as though that result were problematical? 
No; I have never doubted that the Kingdom I have always 
prayed for is coming; that the gospel I have always 
preached is true. I believe that the democracy is getting a 
new heart, and a new spirit, that the nation is being saved. 
It is not yet saved and its salvation depends on you and 
me, but it is being saved. There are signs that a new way 
of thinking, a new social consciousness, are taking possession 
of the nation. I have no time now to tell of the things I 
have seen and heard; let me mention just one. 

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THE INTERPRETER 

In that wonderful trust-built city on Lake Michigan, 
a little crippled newsboy died the other day. He had 
given his life to save the life of a young girl unknown to 
him. He had willingly undergone great suffering, in the 
belief that he might save her, hoping, of course, to keep his 
own life; but when he saw that his own life was to be 
forfeited, he yielded it cheerfully: "I have been of some use, 
after all," he said. Do you remember his name? Let us 
not forget it. Billy Rugh is not the only one who has given 
his life that another might live. It was not his sacrifice, so 
much as the response to it, that stirred my heart. Gary 
is one of the seven wonders of our commercial world. Of 
all the cities of the nation it is, says one, " most emphatically 
the city of dollars, built with the millions of millionaires." 
But this city of thirty thousand sent half of its population 
last Sunday to gather about the coffin of Billy Rugh. 
Fifteen thousand mourners stood there in the street, be- 
cause no room could hold them, listening with uncovered 
head to the funeral prayers and singing with streaming 
eyes, " Nearer my God to Thee." The little crippled 
newsboy had brought them all nearer to God. For 
two hours " the mighty enginery of the Steel Works 
that knows no Sabbath," was hushed to silence in honor 
of this deed of sacrifice. I suppose that none of the 
millionaire builders of Gary could have called forth such 
a tribute. 

They are going, I believe, to build Billy Rugh a monument, 
but an editor says truly: " The only adequate memorial is 

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A NEW HEART FOR THE NATION 

a community made more coherent, hearts made more 
tender, hands made more willing, religion made more real." 
That memorial, made without hands, has already been 
dedicated, and we may see in it one of the signs of a new 
heart in the nation. 



147 



IX 
THE VALUE OF FRAGMENTS 



IX 
THE VALUE OF FRAGMENTS 

There is a lad here which hath five barley loaves and two small 
but what are these among so many? — John 6 : 9. 

The miracles ascribed to Christ serve as illustrations or 
instances of the working of spiritual law in the natural 
world, — reversing Drummond's phrase. Every exercise 
of spiritual power, of human choice or volition, upon the 
lines of physical causation, is, in strictness, supernatural. 
Man is a supernatural being; he must be if he is a child of 
God and is made in God's image; and whenever he exercises 
his prerogative of freedom in changing the direction or 
combining the action of natural forces, he brings to pass 
something which would not come to pass in what we call 
the order of nature. When man was given dominion over 
nature it was expressed in the terms of that commission 
that he was a supernatural being. That, I take it, is one 
of the true insights of the creation story. All the products 
of human art and skill, all the achievements of civilization 
are supernatural. The primeval forest, the uninhabited 
desert are natural; the cultivated field not less than the 
busy city are products of a power above nature, subduing 
and transforming nature to the uses of the spirit. 

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It is not necessary, therefore, to be startled or scandalized 
by suggestions of supernatural action; it is the largest 
part of the everyday experience of human beings. The 
spiritual and the supernatural are synonymous terms. 
Whenever there is a free intelligence at work upon the 
lines of natural causation there is supernatural action. 

The miracles of Christ are peculiar in this, that they are 
easily translatable into terms of the spirit; they are object 
lessons in which spiritual laws are illustrated. 

This feeding of the five thousand is an illustration of the 
spiritual law that our resources are multiplied by expending 
them. The more one gives away of any spiritual possession 
the more one has left. The more one gives of truth, or 
love, or hope, or courage, or sympathy — of the real bread 
of life — the more one has to give. If you can feed five 
thousand with the manna that cometh down from heaven, 
your power to supply such wants will be five thousand 
times greater than if you had kept it all for yourself. 

That is one great spiritual truth which the miracle sug- 
gests, but there is another to which I desire to draw your 
attention, the preciousness of fragments. 

It would seem that this boy had in his basket but the 
leavings, or remnants, of a feast. Some little company, 
perhaps, had had a wayside luncheon, and this was what 
was left. Five barley loaves, thin hard biscuit, and a few 
small fishes. " And what are they," the disciples asked, 
simply enough, " among so many? " What they were to 
learn was that fragments are not to be despised or thrown 

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THE VALUE OF FRAGMENTS 

away; that wisdom and love may make them very produc- 
tive and very serviceable to human needs. 

It is a lesson that we are beginning to learn, in our 
human economy. No small share of the economic gain 
which has been made during the last generation has con- 
sisted in the utilization, by our manufacturers, in what 
are called by-products, of materials that once were cast 
away as remnants or refuse. We have learned that frag- 
ments may have great economic value. 

Think of the wide range of utilities, and beauties that 
have been evoked by the transfiguration of a substance so 
offensive and troublesome as coal tar. Fifty years ago it 
was a nuisance to be got rid of; today it is the basis of 
many of our most beautiful and remunerative industries. 
A long list of the conveniences, necessaries and luxuries of 
life could be traced directly to this black slime. 

The same thing is true of the by-products of petroleum. 
In all our homes and in many of our factories and labora- 
tories, as well as in the pharmacopeia of the physician and 
the apothecary, are substances of value which have been 
saved out of what was once the refuse of the refinery. 

What they do at the slaughter houses we have heard a 
good deal about. And we understand, of course, that many 
of those processes are wholly beneficent; and that great 
additions are made to the wealth of the country by these 
transformations. 

These are only samples of the way in which we are 
learning that the fragments of one process may be the 

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THE INTERPRETER 

staples of another; that human intelligence can find high 
values in scraps and left-overs. 

Perhaps I should be going too far afield for an illustration 
if I should say that the most precious and the most marvel- 
lous physical substance now known to man — the sub- 
stance whose properties seem to be challenging all our 
physical theories, and bringing us, as it were, face to face 
with the infinite — that radium seems to have been dis- 
covered in connection with a kind of mineral vagrant, — 
a poor relation of the nobler minerals, flung out to waste 
on the scrap-heap of the creation. 

In production this utilizing of waste has gone far; in 
many businesses it makes the difference between profit 
and loss. The entire gain is found in incidental economies. 

If we were only as careful to make the most of every- 
thing in consumption as we are in production we should 
soon be rich beyond the dreams of avarice. One of the 
greatest curses of the land is a reckless, lavish, vulgar con- 
sumption; a spending for the sake of spending; a coarse 
kind of cowardice which makes rich people and poor people 
alike ashamed of frugality; which leads them to despise 
the divine wisdom of the Master who bade his disciples, 
after he had fed the five thousand, to gather up the frag- 
ments which remained that nothing be lost. It is to be 
hoped that as our civilization gets a little older we shall 
outgrow this vulgarity, and shall learn, in the administra- 
tion of our homes, the fine art of getting sustenance and 
pleasure and beauty out of much that we now throw away. 

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THE VALUE OF FRAGMENTS 

But these illustrations are stepping-stones to higher 
truths. The principle is full of suggestion and admoni- 
tion to us as we ascend into the realm of conduct and 
character. Fragments here often have great value, 
value which we do not always recognize. You might 
almost say that a man's character is tested by the use which 
he makes of the fragments of time and opportunity. Be- 
cause they seem so slight and incomplete we are often 
inclined to neglect them, to despise them. 

Here is a pupil approaching the end of a term. His 
work has not, on the whole, been very good; he is rather 
ashamed of the record, but the practical question is, What 
will he do with the time that is left? There is but a week 
or two — a few days, possibly; just a fragment of a term; 
what shall be done with it? Let us assume that he is sorry 
and ashamed that he has done no better; that is the right 
attitude toward the past. But how about the rest of the 
days? There is a test of character in them. Too often 
you will hear him saying: " Oh, well, it's no use! Too late 
to make up for a failure. I'll try to do better next term, 
but this term might as well go for a bad job. I'll just take 
it easy and have a good time! " 

That is a very demoralizing attitude. The essence of all 
unfaithfulness and moral cowardice is in it. The student 
who has any adequate sense of responsibility for his conduct 
will say rather: " True there is but a fragment of a term 
left, but I will make the most of it. I will show that my 
regret for lost time is not hypocrisy by filling these days 

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THE INTERPRETER 

brimful of faithful work. I'll have a record of a few days, 
at least, of which I shall not be ashamed." Just a fragment 
of a term, used like that, may be the foundation of a new 
manhood; while used in the other way it may help to 
blight a whole life. 

Men and women often draw near to the end of periods 
of life — years, for example — with some such dissatisfac- 
tion over their past achievements, and then, realizing 
that they have not accomplished all that they hoped, and 
seeing that little time is left, weakly and faithlessly throw 
away that little, instead of making a brave stand upon it, 
determined to redeem the remnant of the year from folly 
and to consecrate it to high uses. 

And I have sometimes seen men drawing near the end of 
life, who seemed to be under the spell of the same craven 
logic. " Too late to make up for a bad day's work," they 
seemed to say; " let it all go; fling it into the junk-pile! " 
and so they send into eternity : 

" A life of nothings, nothing worth, 
From that first nothing ere his birth, 
To that last nothing under earth." 

Can you think of anything much sadder than this? And 
is it not very needful that we get into our minds the truth 
that our treatment of these fragments of time is not a 
light matter; that it is a vital matter; that infidelity here 
is a very touchstone of character? It thrills the heart 
to see a man reversing all this process ; seizing what remains 
of his opportunity, and without any weak repining over 

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THE VALUE OF FRAGMENTS 

past failures, putting all that is left to the highest and best 
uses. " Thank God for this time! " we hear him saying. 
" I wish there were more, but this is mine, and it is precious. 
It shall not be wasted. I will make the most of it! " 

One always thinks, when such an instance appears, of 
Columbus on his caravel, the last night before land was 
sighted. His mutinous crew had insisted on turning back; 
he had extorted from them the concession of one more 
day. That was all that was left, but how full he would 
fill it of hope and courage! 

" One day more 
These muttering shoal brains leave the helm to me: 

One poor day! 
Remember whose, and not how short it is! 
It is God's day, it is Columbus's! 
A lavish day! One day, with life and heart, 
Is more than time enough to find a world! " 

With fragments of life, of faculty and endowment, as 
well as of time, we sometimes have to deal. What volumes 
of reproof and incitement and instruction in righteousness 
we find in the achievements of men who, although lamed 
and mutilated by the loss of the most valuable natural 
powers, have contrived to do beautiful and valuable work 
in various lines of human enterprise! 

In the picture gallery of the old city of Antwerp, a good 
many years ago, I found a man sitting before an easel, 
copying one of the fine modern pictures on the wall, — a 
man whom almost any one would have said, at a glance, 

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THE INTERPRETER 

was not intended by nature to be an artist. He was ab- 
solutely destitute of arms, not the shortest stump protruded 
from the shoulder, and his lower limbs were, I think, so 
crippled that he could not walk, but he was a painter, 
nevertheless, and a good painter. The copy which he had 
nearly completed was an excellent copy; my limited 
knowledge of such work did not detect any fault in the 
technique; he seemed to me to have caught and repro- 
duced very skillfully the spirit of the figure piece on which 
he was engaged. His feet were doing the duty that should 
have fallen to his hands; he sat in his high chair and held 
the brushes between his toes, he mixed the paint on his 
palette, he laid it on delicately and dexterously; his foot 
could say to his hand, " I have no need of you." An 
extreme instance, no doubt; but what a rebuke there is in 
it to the faint hearts and feeble wills who are ready to give 
over all earnest endeavors on account of some slight im- 
pediment or deficiency of power. When such a fraction of a 
man can claim for himself the rights and dignities of high 
manhood, who needs to despair? The least human faculty 
can be very precious, if we make the most of it. 

The miracle of Helen Keller always comes to our minds, 
of course, when we are thinking of these things; and also 
of that little lad in our own city who seems to be advancing 
very bravely along the same path. When, from the human 
equipment, the two royal faculties of sight and hearing are 
both clean gone forever, it seems to be not much more than 
a fragment; yet with these pitifully reduced resources 

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THE VALUE OF FRAGMENTS 

what wonderful things Miss Keller has learned to do; how 
large and rich and beautiful is the life that she is living! 

Less marvellous but hardly less beautiful is such a life 
as that of George Matheson, the poet and prophet, whose 
insights many of us have shared so largely. Smitten with 
blindness at the end of his college course he faltered not for 
a moment, but went straight forward in the career he had 
marked out for himself, finishing his theological studies with 
distinction, then entering at once upon the active work of 
the ministry, in which he became not only the pastor and 
leader of a great church, and a preacher of distinguished 
power, but a scholar of recognized rank and a writer of 
world-wide fame, the author of twenty or thirty volumes, 
which have made all thoughtful men his debtor. 

These great examples of men and women, who, with 
sadly broken powers have subdued kingdoms, wrought 
righteousness, and obtained promises vouchsafed to few of 
their kind, may serve to show us that even fragmentary 
lives may be fruitful and luminous, if courage and hope and 
love do but inform them. 

My thought has been led on to another application of this 
principle which may have meaning for some of you. It 
may be that I am speaking to men and women who feel 
that their religious belief has become altogether fragmen- 
tary. They started out in life, perhaps, with a good stock 
of dogma; with fully elaborated and symmetrical creeds; 
they supposed themselves to be in possession of a pretty 
complete explanation of all the really important things 

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in the heavens above and in the earth beneath. It was 
traditional belief, of course; they had not tried to think it 
out and see whether it represented their real insights; 
they accepted it as the faith of their fathers, and as the 
thing to which it was proper and right for them to give 
their assent. 

In the course of these inquisitive and critical years some 
of these beliefs have become uncertain. It is not that they 
have been consciously rejected, but they no longer seem to 
possess much reality or significance; the terms in which 
they are stated are not convincing; and, in truth, the old 
creed is not now much more than a remnant. It is a state 
of things which often troubles conscientious people. What 
shall they do about it? 

Sometimes they try to bring themselves, by their sense of 
loyalty to the past, and the remembrance of the blessed 
ones who once held these propositions so firmly, to reaffirm 
them all, silencing the protests of reason, and endeavoring 
to override their logic by their will. But that is a dubious 
procedure. You can never afford to try to force the con- 
sent of your mind to propositions which do not appear to 
you reasonable. 

A more common solution of the difficulty, I fear, is that 
of those who are inclined to argue that since so little is 
left it might as well be all thrown away together. Frag- 
ments of a creed, they reason, are worthless; let us get rid 
of them all, and turn our minds to other themes. 

If any one is listening to me who has been inclined to 

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THE VALUE OF FRAGMENTS 

this faithless policy, I desire, right here, to remonstrate. 
Fragments here are worth as much as fragments anywhere, 
and it is the worst kind of waste to neglect or despise them. 
I am very sure that you will find, when you come to scruti- 
nize the remnants of your faith, that they are very precious. 
If you will cherish them, and bring them together, as one 
collects the brands of a sinking wood fire, you may soon 
find them kindling one another into a cheerful glow. I will 
venture the assertion that there is no one here who has 
not enough left to believe in, if he will only reaffirm it and 
make the most of it, to make him a very brave and happy 
man. To utilize the faith we have, be it little or much; 
to cling to it, to rejoice in it, to live by it — this is the 
counsel of wisdom. 

Quite apropos of this I have found in a book which many 
of you have read, " The Upton Letters," by Mr. A. C. 
Benson, — some testimony that I want to repeat to you. 
He is speaking of the inevitable changes in life, of the sense 
of uncertainty and emptiness which they often bring and of 
our need of something of the nature of faith in which at 
such hours we may find anchorage. But he says : 

" It must be a deeper faith than the faith of a dogmatic 
creed; for that is shifting, too, every day, and the simplest 
creed holds some admixture of human temperament and 
human error. 

" To me there are but two things that seem to point to 
hope. The first is the strongest and deepest of human 
things, the power of love — not, I think, the more vehement 

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THE INTERPRETER 

and selfish forms of love, the desire of youth for beauty, 
the consuming love of the mother for the infant, — for 
these have some physical admixture in them. But the 
tranquil and purer manifestations of the spirit, — the love 
of a father for a son, of a friend for a friend; that love which 
can light up a face on the edge of the dark river, and can 
smile in the very throes of pain. That seems to me the 
only thing which holds out a tender defiance against 
change and suffering and death. 

" And then there is the faith in the vast creative Mind 
that bade us be, mysterious and strange as are its mani- 
festations, harsh and indifferent as they sometimes seem, 
yet at worst they seem to betoken a loving purpose, 
thwarted by some cross-current, like a mighty river con- 
tending with little obstacles. Why the obstacles should be 
there, and how they came into being, is dark indeed. But 
there is enough to make us believe in a Will that does its 
utmost and that is assured of some bright and far-off 
victory. 

" A faith in God, and a faith in Love; and here seem to 
me to be the strength and power of the Christian revela- 
tion. It is to these two things that Christ pointed men. 
Though overlaid with definition, with false motive, with 
sophistry, with pedantry, this is the deep secret of the 
Christian Creed; and if we dare to link our will with the 
Will of God, however feebly, however complainingly, — 
if we desire and endeavor not to sin against love, not to 
nourish hate or strife, to hold out the hand again and again 

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THE VALUE OF FRAGMENTS 

to any message of sympathy or trust, not to struggle for 
our own profit, not to reject tenderness, to believe in the 
good faith and the good-will of men, we are then in the 
way. We may make mistakes, we may fall a thousand 
times, but the key of heaven is in our hands." 

A faith in God; a faith in Love; soberly, my friend, are 
not these elements among the things that remain to you — 
that have not been shaken? Well, if you will hold to these, 
if you will rejoice in them, if you will lift them up into the 
light and live by them, you will find that you have a creed 
that will fill your life with hope and courage and patience. 
Believe in these things with all your heart, and all the rest 
of the beliefs you need will be added unto you. 

There is one more lesson in this parable of the fragments 
on which I wish to dwell for a moment before we go. I 
may be speaking to some one who feels that something 
more precious than a creed has gone to wreck, and that is 
manhood or womanhood. There has been failure in con- 
duct, in character; and as you think on these losses and 
disasters, it seems to you that out of the ruin there is not 
much left, that such bits of virtue, such scraps of integrity 
as survive are hardly worth saving. 

You, my friend, are the one above all others to whom 
this truth ought to be reassuring and inspiring. If our 
gospel means anything at all, its message comes direct 
to you in this doctrine of the fragments. To the broken, 
the stranded, the wrecked, the distressed and scattered, 
its first words are spoken. What it tells you is that past 

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THE INTERPRETER 

failures and disasters, no matter how tragical and bewilder- 
ing, are not hopeless; that he who made the worlds out of 
nothing can take the remnants of your manhood and mould 
them into a complete and beautiful life. " Wilt thou be 
made whole?" — that is his very word to you. 

And those fragments that you are almost on the point of 
casting away — consider what they are, and whose image 
and superscription is stamped on them! Do you not find 
among them some things quite too precious to part with; 
some memories that are very dear; some hopes that have 
not wholly withered; some admirations for things high and 
fair; some loyalties that still hold? Better than all is the 
royal Will, the umpire of destiny, your birthright as a man. 
It may have been lamed and enfeebled by disobedience, 
but it is yours, and you must not despise it. 

Bring together these fragments of your manhood, I 
implore you. Nay bring them to Him who blessed the 
loaves beside the sea, and get his estimate of what they are 
worth to you and to the world, and get his blessing upon 
them. Then do with them what was done with the 
fragments that the little lad contributed, — begin to use 
them in some loving ministry. Set your crippled powers to 
serving some who are needier than you are and more 
forlorn! You can find them; doubt it not. 

Some of you cry out against such counsel, I know. You 
say that it is absurd to ask one who is little better than a 
wreck himself to think about rescuing others; better wait 
till he has saved himself before he begins to offer to others 

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THE VALUE OF FRAGMENTS 

the helping hand. Ah, my friend, right there you miss the 
whole meaning of life. The people who wait till they 
themselves are safe before they help their neighbors are 
never saved themselves, and never save anybody else. 
A man in a wreck who said: " Let me first get ashore, and 
then I will try to rescue somebody," would not be likely to 
save anybody but he might have some excuse for his con- 
duct, for he might reasonably fear that any one whom he 
sought to rescue would drag him down; but in the spiritual 
realm that law is exactly reversed; to grapple bravely with 
one who is sinking is the surest way to keep yourself afloat; 
to turn away from him is to tie a millstone to your own feet. 

" Is thy burden hard and heavy? Do thy steps drag wearily? 
Help to bear thy brother's burden; God will bear both it and thee. 
Numb and weary on the mountains, wouldst thou sleep amidst the 

snow? 
Chafe that frozen form beside thee, and together both shall glow." 

Do not try to carry over the maxims of the competitive 
realm into this kingdom of life; here all those rules are 
reversed ; it is by giving that we are enriched, it is by help- 
ing others that we get strength for ourselves; it is by dis- 
pensing our fragments that they are multiplied. 

" To sacrifice, to share, 
Giving as Jesus gave, 
For others' wants to care, 
Not our own lives to save, — 

" This is the living bread 

Which cometh down from heaven; 
Whereof our souls are fed, 
The pure, immortal leaven; 

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THE INTERPRETER 

11 The hidden manna this, 
Whereof who eateth, he 
Grows up in perfectness 
Of Christian symmetry." 

Thus, my friend, I have tried to show you how much 
value there is even in what may seem to you but the rem- 
nants of a life too much of which has been wasted; how 
sacred and significant they are; how beautiful and fruitful 
they may become. None of those other wonders in the 
preservation and transfiguration of waste is to be com- 
pared with this; it is the one splendid thing that may hap- 
pen in God's universe. A soul that is sinking into sin and 
shame may be saved and restored to the gladness and glory 
of manhood. No wonder there is joy in the presence of the 
angels of God when such a thing happens. And it may 
happen to you, today! 



166 



X 
THE JOY OF THE LORD 



X 
THE JOY OF THE LORD 

The joy of the Lord is your strength. — Neh. 8 : 10. 

It is the day of a great festival in Jerusalem, after the 
return from the captivity. The city had been devastated 
by the conquering Chaldeans and the people had been 
carried away captive to Babylon. Under Cyrus, several 
years before, a portion of the captives had been permitted 
to return, but they were very poor and greatly disheartened, 
the surrounding tribes kept harassing them, and many of 
them doubtless were wishing that they were safely back in 
Babylon. But Nehemiah, the Jewish cup-bearer of King 
Artaxerxes, hearing of the sorry plight of his countrymen 
in Jerusalem, sought and obtained a commission from 
the king to go to Jerusalem, and take charge of the rebuild- 
ing of the city. Nehemiah was one of the men who do 
things; the whole situation was changed for the better as 
soon as he took hold of it; the walls of the city were rebuilt, 
the marauders were scattered and the people were settled in 
thrift and peace in their ancient capital. 

Meanwhile Ezra the Scribe had by some means obtained 
a copy of the law. What book this was we do not know, but 
the scholars suggest that it may have been the priestly 

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THE INTERPRETER 

code which is one of the chief constituent documents of 
which the Pentateuch is made up. Whatever it was, 
Ezra was desirous of presenting it to the people; and 
when it was determined to have a great festival, in celebra- 
tion of the rebuilding of the walls and the temple, he seized 
on this occasion to bring this book and its contents to the 
knowledge of the people. So a rostrum was built in one 
of the open spaces, and all the people, — not only the adults, 
men and women, but the young folks, — as many as 
" could understand," the record says, were gathered to- 
gether at daybreak; and they bowed their faces to the 
ground, while Ezra lifted up the sacred roll, and blessed the 
Lord, the great God; and then they stood up and lifted 
up their hands and said, Amen, Amen. Then Ezra began 
to read the book of the law from his pulpit of wood; and 
as he gave forth deliberately the solemn sentences, a group 
of a dozen or more of the Levites, standing about at a little 
distance, caught up the words and repeated them to those 
who stood farther off; and they not only gave the words 
distinctly, the record says, but they gave the sense, so that 
the people understood the reading. 

It was a great day for the Jewish people, no doubt; it was 
the beginning of a new era. Up to this day their religion 
had been, almost exclusively, the religion of the priest 
and the altar; from this day forward it became, more and 
more, the religion of the book and the teacher. 

So Ezra read, and the Levites exhorted and expounded, 
and presently the people began to weep. What do you 

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THE JOY OF THE LORD 

suppose was the reason of their grief? Did they feel that 
this law, thus rehearsed to them, was going to be a burden- 
some imposition? Did they have some dawning sense of 
those aridities and formalities of which Paul speaks so 
feelingly in his letter to the Romans? No, I doubt if they 
had any sense of that defect; they were by no means 
sufficiently developed to realize that a religion by com- 
mandment is a hard religion to live by; that the letter 
killeth; that inspiration is better than injunction and pro- 
hibition. Probably neither the people, nor Ezra the 
scribe, had any such misgiving in their minds as this. All 
that they looked for in religion was stiff and severe rules, — 
with some provision for wiping off the old score when their 
transgressions had accumulated. It was not, probably, 
the rigor of the rule that made them weep. 

Perhaps they began to cry when the law was read to them 
for the same reason that a good many people nowadays 
are disposed to be very solemn and tearful when you begin 
to talk to them about religion. It is a common impression 
that to be religious is to be melancholy; that thoughts of 
God and our relations to him are naturally depressing 
thoughts. There are words in the Bible which seem to 
teach this. The author of the Book of Ecclesiastes, in 
one of his darker moods, tells us that it is better to go to 
the house of mourning than to the house of feasting; that 
sorrow is better than laughter; for by the sadness of the 
countenance the heart is made better. And this is true 
at certain times, and for certain persons; perhaps it was 

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true of those whom this preacher had in mind while he was 
writing these words. There are a great many light-headed, 
frivolous, irresponsible people for whom such a vision of 
the sorrow which is inseparable from all life would be 
medicinal. 

But we must be careful how we make of every maxim 
we find in the Bible a universal rule; for many of them are 
only intended to meet certain exceptional conditions, and 
the authors are by no means always careful to give them 
philosophical breadth and completeness. Even this ec- 
clesiast sings a very different tune in some portions of 
this very book. 

" Then I commended mirth " he says; " because a man 
hath no better thing under the sun than to eat and 
drink and to be merry, for that shall abide with him 
all the days of his life which God hath given him under 
the sun." 

" Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy 
wine with a merry heart, for God hath already accepted 
thy works. Let thy garments be always white and let 
not thy head lack ointment." 

That is the voice of another of his moods; it is not by 
any means a safe generalization for conduct, but it is fit 
counsel for some persons, at some seasons. So far as this 
moralist is concerned it is not at all safe to take his maxims 
at random and try to elevate them into rules of life. These 
much-quoted texts, therefore, which put the stamp of 
their approval on the somber life, are not to be taken too 

172 



THE JOY OF THE LORD 

seriously. But these people had not read the preaching of 
Koheleth, for his book was written at a much later day; 
and it is not at all probable that their grief had its sources 
in that sentimental pietism which feels that one cannot be 
religious without crying. 

There must have been some reason for their weeping. 
What was it? The most credible, perhaps the most credita- 
ble supposition is that they were profoundly impressed with 
the fact that there had been a wide discrepancy between 
their own conduct and the provisions of this law. A great 
multitude of things were commanded in it which they had 
never done, and of which, perhaps, they had hardly heard; 
a great many things were forbidden in it which they had 
been practising all their lives. A good many of these 
things were ceremonials, to be sure; but they were things 
commanded just the same; and I doubt whether those old 
Hebrews made much of the distinction which we have 
learned to make between the moral and the ceremonial 
law; the disobedience of one kind of law was just as sinful, 
in their judgment, as the disobedience of any other kind of 
law; and while Ezra was reading the law, section by sec- 
tion, and the Levites were lining it out, and they were 
listening to the things commanded and forbidden, the 
thought came home to them that their lives had been 
full of transgression and disobedience. If this law was 
really the expression of the will of God concerning them, 
then they had been ignoring his will or setting it at naught. 
And if, as may well have been the case, those fearful 

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maledictions against disobedience which the Book of 
Deuteronomy contains were part of the law read in their 
hearing, — if that fierce litany of blessings and curses was 
sounding in their ears, — then we need not wonder that 
they found themselves in a melancholy mood. " For 
all the people wept, when they heard the words of 
the law." 

But this was not the kind of response which Ezra and 
his Levites were looking for. It was a great festival which 
they had tried to organize; it was not a fast; it was not a 
penitential occasion. " The Israelite leaders," says Dr. 
Adeny, " did not share the feeling of grief. In their eyes 
the sorrow of the Jews was a great mistake. It was even 
a wrong thing for them thus to distress themselves. Ezra 
loved the law, and therefore it was a dreadful surprise for 
him to discover that the subject of his devoted studies was 
regarded so differently by his brethren. Nehemiah and the 
Levites shared his more cheerful view of the situation." 
And therefore they protested vehemently against defiling 
this day of delight with these unseemly wailings. "This day 
is holy unto the Lord your God," said Nehemiah; " mourn 
not nor weep. ... Go your way, eat the fat, and drink 
the sweet, and send portions unto him for whom no- 
thing is prepared; for this day is holy unto our God; 
neither be ye grieved; for the joy of the Lord is your 
strength." 

This I suppose was the passage out of which grew our 
Puritan Thanksgiving Day, for our New England fathers 

174 









THE JOY OF THE LORD 

were always quoting these words in their Thanksgiving 
services. 

Upon the last sentence, which is our text, our thought 
may well pause. " The joy of the Lord." The phrase is 
not a familiar one. There are a great many texts in which 
we are bidden to rejoice in the Lord; and it is not a remote 
suggestion that right relations with him will inspire joy in 
us. " This ' joy of the Lord/ " says one commentator, " is 
the joy that springs up in our hearts by means of our rela- 
tion to God. It is a God-given gladness, and it is found in 
communion with God." But this seems to me to stop just 
short of the real meaning of the text. It is the joy of the 
Lord of which these worshippers are bidden to think, and 
not merely the joy which he inspires in us. The truth was 
suggested to them that the great God is himself a happy 
being; that that is the thought of him with which we need 
to become familiar. Indeed it seems difficult to imagine 
how our relations with him could make us glad unless his 
life is a joyful life. Intimacy with one who is morose or 
moody or cold is not apt to fill any one with joy. It is 
quite impossible, psychologically, for us to rejoice in the 
Lord unless we are able to rejoice with him. 

I doubt if this is, with all of us, a common thought of 
God. We think of him as righteous, as holy, as just, as 
kind, as compassionate, but we do not often think of him 
as one whose life is full of joy. But might we not, if we 
considered more deeply and seriously, find room for such a 
conception? Might we not discover as we walk amid the 

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fresh beauty of these June days, some reasons for believing 
that He who hath made all these things is not only powerful 
and wise and beneficent, but that he is happy. 

" He sendeth forth springs into the valleys, 
They run among the mountains, 
They give drink to every beast of the field; 
The wild asses quench their thirst, 
By them the birds of the heaven have their habitations, 
They sing among the branches. 
He watereth the mountains from his chambers, 
The earth hath its full from the fruit of thy works. 

" He causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, 
And herbs for the service of man, 
That he may bring food out of the earth, 
And wine to make glad the heart of man, 
Oil to make his face to shine, 
And bread to strengthen man's heart." 

Is it conceivable that he whose life is the source of all 
this gladness is not himself glad? " Thou hast put gladness 
in my heart !" cries the Psalmist. It is out of the fulness of 
his own life that all his good gifts come. 

God is the Creator. On the side of power that is the 
greatest thought that we can think about him. The Crea- 
tor of the world and all the worlds; the author of the 
Universe; the Source of Law and Life and Love. Law is 
not something that just happened to be; Life is not some- 
thing that sprang out of nothing; Love is not a breath that 
bloweth nowhither. God is the Author of them all. And 
the universe is full of the wonders of his power. 

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THE JOY OF THE LORD 

" O Lord, how manifold are thy works; 
In wisdom hast thou made them all." 

This work of Creation is always in progress. " My 
Father worketh hitherto," said Jesus, " and I work." And 
all that we know of this work of creation makes us believe 
that it is a perennial source of joy to the Creator. Be- 
cause we are his children and share his nature, we, in our 
measure and order, do know something of what Creation 
means. That is the difference between a man and a thing; 
a man can create; he can originate new lines of causation. 
And we know that one of the highest joys possible to man 
is the joy of creation. 

To make a new combination of forces; to give form to a 
thought; to start a new movement; this is the kind of 
activity which gives to human beings the keenest pleasure. 
Not very long ago, a little boy in whose home I was calling 
and whom I had not seen for some months came bringing 
to me some little pieces of cabinet work which he had made 
with his own hands. How his eyes danced! He had found 
more pleasure in that creative work than any kind of game 
or contest could possibly have given him, and it was a far 
higher kind of pleasure. 

We are beginning to give our children in school the chance 
to enter into this joy, the joy of the maker, and if we can 
only lead them into it far enough, there will be redemption 
in it. This is the joy of the artist, the joy of creation; 
and although we have sometimes made art a curse, just 
as we have religion, by separating it from life, instead of 

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mingling it with life, it is, nevertheless, the activity in 
which men come nearest to God. 

The day will come, I trust, when Industry and Art 
which God hath joined together, will no longer be put 
asunder by the greed of man. For as Ruskin said, the 
divorce is one in which both are discrowned and degraded. 
For Art without Industry is frivolity ; and Industry without 
Art is brutality. Work is always a joy when something of 
the zest of creation enters into it. When God made man 
in his own image, he made him not to be a drudge, but a 
creator. 

The point at which I am aiming is that our human 
experience in many phases helps us to understand that the 
Creator of the ends of the earth, who fainteth not neither is 
weary, must find in this work of creation an infinite joy. 

But his joy is not merely the joy of the mechanician, 
the artist; it is the joy of the life-giver. It is the joy of 
parentage. He is the God and Father of us all, and the 
father's chief joy is in his children. Parental love is the 
source of the highest and purest joy that human beings 
know. 

Those great words of Jesus — to some of you, in the most 
sacred moment of life, they have come as the revelation of 
the deepest secret of existence: " She remembereth no 
more her sorrow, for joy that a man is born into the world." 
And you, father, when you held your first-born in your 
arms and looked into his face, was there not opened in 
your life a well-spring deeper than you had known before? 

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THE JOY OF THE LORD 

Now God is the Father of us all. This is our Christian 
faith. He is the One of whom every fatherhood on earth 
and in heaven is named. The joy of parenthood in its 
fullest and deepest sense he knows. It is a joy that is 
never separated from sorrow, in humanity or in divinity, — 
as we shall see; but it is a joy that is victorious over sorrow, 
as light is victorious over shadow, as life is the conqueror 
of death. And this joy of parenthood is the joy of the 
Lord, his dearest joy, I think. Could you conceive of him 
as being destitute of that joy? There are those who tell 
us that the sin of man has cancelled, for the great majority 
of the race, the fact of the divine fatherhood; that God is 
not a father to any but the good people. It seems to me 
a blasphemy against fatherhood to say any such thing. 
And though his children, through their disobedience, often 
cause him sorrow, yet the joy which springs from love vic- 
torious over sin and death is his eternal portion. 

For the joy of redemption is the chief joy of the eternal 
love. Those three great parables of Jesus — the Lost 
Sheep, the Lost Coin, and the Lost Son — what are they 
but the revelation of the joy of the Lord in the restoration 
of his wandering children. " Rejoice with me," cries the 
good shepherd, " f or I have found my sheep which was 
lost." " Rejoice with me," says the good woman to her 
neighbors, " f or I have found the piece that was lost." 
" Bring forth the best robe and put it on him," cries the 
Prodigal's father, — who is none other than our Father in 
heaven; " and put a ring on his hand and shoes on his 

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feet; and bring the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and 
make merry; for this my son was dead and is alive again; 
he was lost and is found/ ' And this, if Jesus knew the 
Father's heart, is the joy of the Lord. 

And, finally, for I must not linger on a theme so inspiring, 
the joy of the Lord finds its deepest source in his sure 
knowledge of the triumph of his kingdom, which is righteous- 
ness and peace and friendship and good will. His redeem- 
ing love which suffers to save will win at last, and he knows 
it. The kingdoms of this world shall become the King- 
dom of the Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever 
and ever. The prodigal children, in that far country of 
strife and animalism, and selfishness, will come to them- 
selves, by and by, and come home to the Father's house. 
Little by little the light of the knowledge of the glory of 
God, as it shines in the face of Jesus Christ, will find its 
way into the darkened minds of men, and they will come to 
see that egoistic struggle for the good of life is not the 
law of nature for men; that it is the law of the ape and 
tiger; that it is contrary to the law of man's higher nature; 
that the law of good will, of service, of helpfulness, is the 
only law of human intercourse; and they will throw away 
the weapons of their warfare and join hands in working 
for the common good. 

For this blessed day the King of love, our Shepherd, has 
waited long, is waiting still; it cannot be hastened, 
force cannot bring it in; omnipotence cannot compel it; 
it cannot come until men choose it as the chief good; and 

180 



THE JOY OF THE LORD 

they will not choose it until they have tried all the ways of 
selfishness and found them vain. 

But the great God whose patience is infinite knows that 
the day will come, and out of that knowledge springs the 
joy that floods the creation. He knows that the day is 
coming when from under the whole heaven wars shall cease; 
when the streets of our cities will no more be blocked 
with the conflict and carnage of quarreling classes; when a 
better way will be found of settling the terms of labor 
than that which stops the wheels of industry, and fills a 
thousand homes with wan-faced women and starving 
children. And while, to the infinite compassion, this hour 
of the world's agony and travail must bring unspeakable 
pain, yet we may well believe that he sees in it all the suicide 
of war; the demon of strife destroying himself; the begin- 
ning of the end of Satan's reign upon the earth. The 
fearful cost he knows, but he knows also the greatness of 
the gain; he knows that the time is coming when the 
children of men, instead of struggling against one another 
for the good of life and the possession of the earth, will 
band themselves together to conquer poverty and pesti- 
lence; to make war on barrenness and want; to bridle 
the floods; to subdue the jungles and the swamps; to 
transfigure the slums, to work with God to bring in the 
reign of plenty and peace. And it is this great knowledge 
that fills the heart of the eternal Father with everlasting joy. 

Now it is not to be supposed that when Ezra and Nehe- 
miah and their band of Levites stilled the weeping of the 

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people that day in old Jerusalem by telling them of the 
joy of the Lord, that many of them analyzed the phrase 
as we have done; but the phrase did, undoubtedly, mean 
something to them; it conveyed to them the idea that the 
great God whom they loved and worshipped was a happy 
God, and that his children ought to share his gladness. 
It was surely a most unseemly thing for the worshippers 
of One whose life is the outflowing of joy to present to him 
as their offering on his holy day no better tribute than 
tears and sobs and wailings. It was a strange way to do 
him honor. They worship him best who enter into closest 
fellowship with him, who become partakers of his nature. 

But it was not only urged upon them by their teachers 
that they ought to be sharers in his joy, there was a great 
consequence of that communion. " The joy of the Lord 
is your strength." Strength was needed for the work now 
before them; for the reclamation of the waste places; for 
the rehabilitation of their ruined homes; for the rebuilding 
of the commonwealth; for the maintenance of pure and 
upright and godly lives under these hostile conditions. 
And for these stern tasks there could be no better tonic 
than the gladness of God. " All gladness, all cheerful- 
ness," says Dr. McLaren, " has something to do with our 
efficiency; for it is the prerogative of man that this force 
comes from his mind, not from his body. For strength 
there must be hope, for strength there must be joy. If the 
arm is to smite with vigor, it must smite at the bidding of a 
calm and light heart." 

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THE JOY OF THE LORD 

These old Hebrews were good enough philosophers, I 
dare say, to feel the force of these considerations. They 
knew that for the tasks upon their hands they needed a 
courageous and efficient people; and that no better in- 
spiration for courage and efficiency could be found than that 
which would come to them with the knowledge that the 
great God whom they loved and worshipped was a happy 
Being who desired them to share his happiness. 

I hope that for us there are some deeper and larger 
reasons for believing this truth than could have been known 
to them. We have considered some of these reasons. We 
have learned from Jesus Christ a great deal more about God 
than they could possibly have known. We know with 
what tenderness he clothes the lilies and watches the herds 
and ministers to the wants of all his living creatures, what 
joy he finds in all the works of his hands. We know some- 
thing about him, which was never so fully revealed until 
Jesus made it known; and we cannot, without blurring 
and distorting the truth as it is in Jesus, have any doubt 
about his universal Fatherhood, and his redeeming love. 
That the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ must 
be a Being of infinite blessedness should not be, to any 
Christian, an open question. 

Our God is a happy God; let us never lose that. And 
because we believe that he is happy, we know that he is 
good. Because he is happy we know that he can never 
have done the kind of things that men are sometimes ac- 
cusing him of doing. If he had really disinherited all but a 

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THE INTERPRETER 

few of his children, — cut them off and exiled them from 
his presence; and there were only a few good people in the 
world for whom he had a Father's love, — he would not 
be a happy God; of that we are perfectly sure. 

But because he is a happy God, we know that all things 
are working together for good. He knows all the trouble 
and misery and sin and wrong of this world far better than 
any of us can know it; and it would be blasphemy to say 
that he does not care, and moral blindness to argue that it 
costs him no suffering; he does suffer always for the sins of 
the world; he does bear about a sorrow that only a God 
could bear; but through all the suffering there is triumph, 
and over all the sorrow there is victory. 

Something we men know of the merging of these two great 
experiences. " These two things," says Dr. Maclaren, 
" are not contradictory; these two states of mind, both of 
them the natural operations of any deep faith, of any deep 
religious feeling, may coexist and blend into one another, 
so that the gladness is sobered and chastened, and made 
manly and noble, and that the sorrow is like some 
thundercloud all streaked with bars of sunshine that go into 
its deepest depths." Was it not said of Jesus that it was 
"because of the joy that was set before him that he endured 
the cross, despising the shame." 

No; our God is not stolid, passionless, indifferent to our 
mortal woe; he is a human God; he knoweth our frame, he 
remembereth that we are dust, and our pain and sorrow are 
his burden; but over all this grief and loss his love is vic- 

184 



THE JOY OF THE LORD 

torious and triumphant; and the joy of the Lord like the 
waves of ocean, mighty, multitudinous, is forever breaking 
on these shores of time. 

And it is this joy, the joy that springs out of victorious 
love, that is our strength. We know that he loves us, and 
we know that because he is happy, it is well with us. That 
is to say, it must be well with us if the ruling motives of our 
lives are in harmony with his great purpose. He is the 
King of love, and he is subduing the universe to the obe- 
dience of love. His joy is in the fulfilment of that great 
purpose. If you are working with him, his joy will be your 
strength. If you are working against him, his joy will be 
your discomfiture. 

But to all the great multitude who are seeking to rule 
their lives by the law of good will, this high assurance of 
the happiness of God, must bring strength. Let us try to 
see what it means for each of us. 

To you, my friend, laboring up the heavy grade with a 
load that oppresses you; fighting the inbred sin, with only 
equivocal victories; discouraged, sometimes, and lonely; 
you ought to know that this great Friend is glad whenever 
he thinks of you. For he knows what no one else can know 
so well, — better, perhaps than you yourself know, — 
that the thing which you want is the thing that he wants 
of you — to get the better of the worser self; to get the 
world and the flesh under your feet; to win out of your 
weaknesses into a clean, strong, manly life; he knows all 
this, and he knows that what is your deepest wish is to be 

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THE INTERPRETER 

your portion; and though he is full of compassion for your 
infirmities and failures, he is happy, happy when he thinks 
of you; and he wants you to know it, for his joy will be 
your strength. 

If the joy of the Lord is the joy of the Creator and the 
Life-giver, the joy of the Parent in his offspring, the joy of the 
Redeemer who is bringing many sons unto glory, the joy of 
the King of love in the triumph of his Kingdom of good will, 
then to all the good wishes, the right purposes, the worthy 
energies of his children, his joy will bring strength. 



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XI 



PUT FIRST THINGS FIRST 



XI 
PUT FIRST THINGS FIRST 

Be not, therefore, anxious, saying ivhat shall we eat? or what shall we 
drink f or wherewithal shall we be clothed? For after all these things 
do the Gentiles seek; for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need 
of these things. But seek ye first his kingdom and his righteousness; 
and all these things shall be added unto you. — Matt. 6 : 31-33. 

There is need that attention be often called to the mis- 
leading phrase of the old version of this text, in which we 
are bidden to " take no thought " for food or raiment, 
instead of being admonished, as in the correct rendering of 
the revised version, not to be anxious, not to worry about 
them. Without forethought for these needs man would be 
no better than the brutes — not so good as the wisest of 
them; but one may think of present and future needs and 
make judicious provision for them, without being con- 
sumed with care and anxiety concerning them; and it is 
this excessive solicitude which is here reproved and not any 
reasonable care for daily wants. 

" Put first things first " — that is the meaning of this 
counsel. The main thing is to be faithful to the highest we 
know — the ideal; to that everything else must be sub- 
ordinate and tributary. " Seek first the Kingdom of God 
and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added 
unto you" 

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THE INTERPRETER 

It is this last phrase which I want you to consider this 
morning. Just how much does it mean? I sometimes 
hear it quoted as an assurance that prosperity and plenty 
will be the reward of those who are faithful in their relig- 
ious duties. That is the early Old Testament morality, 
and there are many who still feel that something is wrong if 
the good man is not a rich man, at any rate a prosperous 
man. But the New Testament greatly changes the empha- 
sis of this proposition; it teaches us to look in other direc- 
tions for proofs of the divine approbation. It even goes 
so far as to say that it is very hard for a rich man to be a 
good man, and to pronounce a beatitude upon poverty — 
" Blessed are ye poor, for yours is the Kingdom of God." 
Yet here is an assurance that fidelity to spiritual ideals will 
bring temporal rewards. Be not anxious about food and 
raiment; seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteous- 
ness and all these things shall be added unto you. 

But what things? Riches, luxuries, abundance of 
creature comforts? No; there is no such assurance. Only 
so much of this world's goods as your heavenly Father sees 
that you have need of. That is all you can make out of this 
promise. And that may be very little. It may not be 
any more than the Master himself received as the recom- 
pense of his supreme devotion to the Kingdom. The 
Father in heaven knew what he had need of and gave him 
what was meet. None of us is entitled to complain if he 
gets no larger reward. It is enough for the disciple to 
be as his Master and the servant as his Lord. 

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PUT FIRST THINGS FIRST 

Still the text gives us the assurance that those who put 
first things first may expect that at least the necessaries 
of fife will be theirs. The heavenly Father will see to it 
that the life which is lived in conformity to his law of love 
is sustained and preserved, so that it may complete and 
fulfil itself. 

To deny or question that this is the normal human 
condition seems to me to impeach the creation. It is 
nothing less than absurd to say that if you five by the law 
which God has ordained for you to live by, you will lose 
your life. What kind of a God must it be, who has made 
such a world as this — that those who try to five in it by the 
law which he has impressed upon their souls, cannot live 
at all? 

Yet there are people in these days who insist that this is 
the condition in which we find ourselves. The entire 
scheme of society, they insist, is radically and totally 
iniquitous; so that you cannot live the good life in the 
existing social order; if you attempt it you will lose your 
life; to keep alive you must so conform to the existing 
system of things that you will be continually doing evil. 
This is the way one writer puts it : — 

" However hard or devoutly our wills be set against it, 
so long as the system exists, we are all competitors in some 
degree. All of us who live in any measure of comfort, 
live more or less by economic stealing, no matter what our 
occupations or intentions. Our comforts are bought with 
the poverty and even the lives of beaten men and women. 

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"It is practically true, and ought to be true, that none 
of us can extricate ourselves from the social disgrace and 
pain until the whole social life is extricated. We cannot 
sleep, eat, wear clothes, travel, educate ourselves, read 
books, attend public worship, without participating in the 
social wrong and bearing the social guilt." 

And another writer adds the same testimony : 

" We can no more keep what we have than we can ' make 
a living ' without taking advantage of the system of society 
founded, as it is, on injustice. Every one knows that 
if he is in business, he prospers only by taking trade from 
some one else; and that, if he is not in business, he lives as 
directly upon others as if he ate their flesh." And then 
he goes on to show how, in the complex social order, we are 
all involved in manifold injustices. " The paper on 
which I write, " he says, " paid a profit to the paper trust, 
and the book reached you loaded with inflated charges of 
transportation companies. Each of these corporations, 
to which you and I have contributed, has the power to 
deprive men of liberty and of freedom to do right; forces 
them into various deceptions, oppressions and frauds, in 
order to advance its interests and to retain their situations. 
So we are compelled, and assist in compelling each other, 
to live in a state of war." 

That there is much truth in all this, every conscientious 
person knows. The solidarity of condition involves all of 
us in equivocal and compromising situations. Every man 
is placed, very often, in circumstances in which absolute 

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PUT FIRST THINGS FIRST 

truth and absolute integrity and absolute justice are very 
difficult to realize. To live in such a society as that which 
now exists and keep wholly clear from complicity in its 
iniquities is not possible. We are compelled to use goods 
and instruments and facilities which are more or less in- 
fected with injustice and cruelty. We are compelled to have 
social contact and friendly relations with people, much of 
whose conduct is reprehensible. To refuse to partake of 
an article of food unless you knew that no wrong had been 
done to any one in bringing it to your table, would greatly 
limit your dietary; to refuse to wear a garment unless you 
knew that no unrighteousness was woven into any part of 
its fabric, would leave you scantily covered; to travel on 
no public conveyance by which you did not increase the 
rewards of iniquity, would keep you close at home. And if 
you kept company with nobody who was ever unjust or 
unkind, you would have very few friends. 

I cannot imagine that Jesus ever attempted to govern 
his conduct by any such rigid rules of behavior. Society 
was far less complex in his day than in ours, yet it must have 
been necessary for him, very often, to partake of food in 
whose preparation greed and selfishness had mingled; and 
to associate with people, both rich and poor, whose conduct 
was not blameless. To have kept himself free from all 
such complicity in the evil of the world would have been 
impossible; to protest against every form of it would have 
been unwise. He could not, thus, have formed the friend- 
ships by which his life was communicated and his kingdom 

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THE INTERPRETER 

established. Doubtless he was brought into contact with 
much that greatly pained him; doubtless he thus seemed to 
approve of much that was abhorrent to him; but he bore 
this suffering silently that he might gain for himself and his 
message entrance into human hearts. 

Nor can we charge him, in this, with being false to the 
ideal. It was the ideal that commanded him, that con- 
strained him to do these things. This was part of his 
humiliation. 

There were times when, against all this corporate wicked- 
ness of the world, his protest flamed; times when this 
selfishness and hypocrisy and cruelty of the world heard 
the thunders of his denunciation and felt the lash of his 
censure; but his judgment was reserved for the occasions 
when it was clearly called for, and could be made effective. 
If he had been constantly in arms against the environing 
evil, he would have found no place in human hearts for the 
good seed of the Kingdom. 

What must have been impossible for Jesus in his day 
is no more possible for the best of his disciples in these days. 
We cannot avoid some measure of complicity in the sur- 
rounding social injustices and evils. 

In view of this fact some faithless souls rush to the con- 
clusion that it is useless to try to resist the evil tendencies; 
that since nobody can keep himself wholly clear from the 
social iniquities, nobody can be blamed for consenting to 
them and profiting by them. " It is all a matter of degree," 
they say; " there are no absolutely honest people; a little 

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PUT FIRST THINGS FIRST 

matter of more or less is not worth making a fuss about; 
we may as well make the most of our opportunities." 

But it must be noted that the difference between a forced 
and a voluntary complicity in the environing evil, is wide 
as infinity and deep as the bottomless pit. We cannot 
help being involved in this corporate injustice, but we can 
hate it and resist it, and lift up our voices against it. When- 
ever and wherever it is possible to make a protest effective 
our protest must be made. It must be evident to all men 
that we are not consenting to this wrong, that we are 
simply enduring it. We are all more or less implicated 
in these evil conditions; but the vital question for every 
man is what is his attitude toward them? If he regards 
them with toleration or complacency, if he is even willing 
to use them for his own aggrandizement, then the curse 
which they are calling down from heaven must rest on his 
soul; if he makes it clear to himself and to the world that 
they are abhorrent and accursed in his sight, his contact 
with them means no soilure to his spirit. 

But there is a larger truth to which our thought must 
reach, if we are going to deal fairly with this question. 
We have been looking, thus far, upon only one side of the 
social shield, and we must not forget that it has two sides. 
The passages which I have quoted imply that there is but 
one set of forces at work in modern society, the malign 
and destructive forces. They assume that rapacity and 
greed are the only elements entering into industrial society, 
— or, at any rate, that they are so universally prevalent 

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THE INTERPRETER 

that any contrary influences are practically negligible. 
The statement is distinctly made in one of the passages I 
read a little while ago, that the existing system of society 
is founded on injustice. Probably the writer is thinking 
of economic society. But I do not think that this is true 
of any existing system of economic society. A society 
founded on injustice could not endure. The foundation 
of our industrial society is justice; the principle of the 
square deal and the quid pro quo underlies it all. We have 
not undertaken to build up a social order upon the basis of 
wrong. We have never said one to another, " Go to, let 
us establish a social system in which injustice shall be the 
rule." Such a proposition would be as absurd, intel- 
lectually, as it would be morally abominable. On the 
contrary our social and industrial order rests upon the 
assumption that men will do right, that all exchanges will 
be fair exchanges, that the relations of men will be relations 
of mutual benefit. 

So, to a very large extent, they are today. There is 
still a great deal of honesty and equity and fair dealing in 
the relations of men with one another. 

It is true that under the tremendous compulsions of 
greed and covetousness this industrial system has been 
greatly perverted, and that the tendency now widely 
prevails for the strong to push the weak to the wall, and 
for the heartless and inhuman to trample under foot 
those whom they are able to overcome in the strife. But 
this is not, in anybody's view, the natural or normal 

196 



PUT FIRST THINGS FIRST 

social system. It is a disordered and diseased social 
system. 

If you say that competition is the law of the existing 
industrial system and that competition involves the de- 
structive work which I have just been describing, I answer 
that competition, in the economist's conception of it, is 
rivalry of service, rather than a strife for mastery. No 
political philosopher would advocate war as the regulative 
principle of economic society. It is true that competition 
does, too often, degenerate into war, but that is not the 
conception of its function on which industrial society is 
founded or defended. 

Nor is it, I repeat, true even of the existing industrial 
regime, that all its movements are malign and destructive. 
No more true is it that in the wider relations of men, all 
the influences and tendencies are toward evil. Evil is 
mingled through and through the whole social order; we 
are in contact with it everywhere; but it is not all evil; 
to assume that attitude toward it is a tremendous mistake. 

The social system, the industrial system, like everything 
else in this world, is compounded of good and evil; the 
light and the darkness are struggling together for the 
mastery. Selfishness and heartlessness and greed are 
strongly intrenched in it, but justice and good will, and 
consideration and compassion, everywhere appear in con- 
flict with them. 

The fact is that the social system consists simply of 
human beings, men and women; and while human beings 

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THE INTERPRETER 

are not all angels, neither are they all demons. There 
are all sorts among them; some are cruel, egoistic, rapa- 
cious; some are gentle, sympathetic, generous. Nay, in 
every character we find a great variety of elements; the 
good and the evil mingle and contend in every human 
life. The social system, the industrial system which is 
made up of such characters, is not wholly good nor wholly 
bad. It is a very mixed quantity. The malign and benign 
elements are striving together in it for the mastery. There 
is room in it for cupidity and brutality and wolfish raven; 
there is room in it for magnanimity and chivalry and 
Christly service. And they are all there. All the worst and 
all the best qualities of human nature find expression in 
this complex which we call the social system. 

Nor am I by any means prepared to admit that the worst 
elements preponderate. On the whole I believe that, tak- 
ing our social system as a whole, even as at present organ- 
ized, truth and goodness tend to prevail over deceit and 
iniquity. On the whole I believe that in this present world, 
taking all its departments together — the business world, the 
professional world, the social world, the political world, — 
the powers that make for righteousness are proving 
themselves stronger than the powers that make for wicked- 
ness. 

When this present world of ours — this American world 
— has any big question to settle, are we not pretty confident 
that if we can get it fairly discussed it will be settled the 
right way? Take the biggest question we have had to deal 

198 



PUT FIRST THINGS FIRST 

with — the slavery question: did not the people prove, 
in their settlement of that question, that right was dearer 
to them than self-interest? Is it not so in every clearly 
denned issue? Are not justice and truth and humanity 
the prevailing forces in every such conflict? How is it 
now, in the struggle with predatory wealth? At every 
phase of this struggle does it not become increasingly evi- 
dent that the people are bent on securing justice and right- 
eousness? 

In a keen article in the Atlantic Monthly, on " The 
Grilling of Sinners," Prof. Edward Alsworth Ross calls 
attention to "the popular error that society's castigation 
of the sinner is simply the assertion of the self-interest of 
the many." The people who are now undergoing social 
censure are disposed, he says, to plead that the uprising 
against them is inspired by selfishness of the crowd, who 
envy their prosperity. But this, he says, is " moral gan- 
grene, so deadly that no one with the infection ought to 
have place or influence in society. The truth is," he 
continues, " law is shot through and through with con- 
science. The uprising against rebating or monopoly, or 
fiduciary sin, registers, not the self-interest of the many, but 
the general sense of right. To be sure, an agitation against 
company stores, or the two-faced practises of directors, 
may start as the ' We won't stand it ' of a victimized class; 
but when it solicits general support it takes the form ' these 
things are wrong/ and it can triumph only when it chimes 
with the common conscience. In the case of child labor, 

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THE INTERPRETER 

night work for women, crimping and peonage, the opposi- 
tion springs up among onlookers rather than among vic- 
tims, and is chivalric from the beginning. The fact is that 
the driving force of the great sunward movement now on, 
is moral indignation. Not one of the attempts to shackle 
the newer stripe of depredators lends itself to interpreta- 
tion in terms of self-interest. In every instance the slogan 
has been, not ' Protect yourselves! ' but ' Put down ini- 
quity! ' " 

That is the deepest fact of the existing social order. 
To say, therefore, that this order is " founded on injustice," 
or that its total product is cruelty, is greatly to misjudge it. 
It is still infested with many malignant wrongs ; there is a 
tremendous battle, all the while, between the powers of 
good and the powers of evil; but it is not a losing battle, 
and there never was a day when its issue was less in doubt 
than it is today. 

So we come back to the question from which we started : 
Is it true that the man who puts the first things first has no 
chance for his life in this present world? Is it true that 
fidelity to the ideal means, in all cases, martyrdom? Or 
is the assurance of Jesus true — that one who seeks first 
the Kingdom of God and his righteousness may trust that 
all things needful for the maintenance of the best life will 
be added unto him? 

Of course we must make no sweeping generalizations. 
Fidelity to the ideal may cost any of us the loss of all 
things — life itself. For that sacrifice we must be ready. 

200 



PUT FIRST THINGS FIRST 

None of us is guaranteed against it; to hesitate about it is 
to fall from the heights of integrity : 

" Though love repine and reason chafe, 
There comes a voice without reply : 
'Tis man's perdition to be safe, 
When for the truth he ought to die." 

So long as this world is as badly out of joint as it is, 
fidelity to the highest we know may lead us up the steps 
of Calvary. That is where it led Jesus, and we must not 
be afraid to follow him. But martyrdom is not the normal 
outcome of the good life. It is the fruit of abnormal condi- 
tions; it is a remedy for social disease. Every one who 
thus suffers inspires those who look on with horror of the 
sin that causes the suffering, and makes it less probable 
that others will suffer. The fact that he would not save 
himself by apostasy, strengthens the faith of others, and 
deepens their hatred of the wrong that made him suffer. 
Slowly, thus, through the heroism of the faithful, life, with 
all its rewards and opportunities, is won for those who will 
stand fast for the ideal. And as the years increase the 
assurance strengthens that they who put first things first 
shall find all needful things added unto them. That 
surely must be the law of God's Kingdom. Those who 
would live the good life must have the chance to live it, 
else life is futile and meaningless. 

This does not mean that all our cravings are to be grati- 
fied; it means that we shall have what we need. It cer- 
tainly does not mean that we shall be billionaires; our 

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THE INTERPRETER 

heavenly Father knows that we have no need of any such 
thing. But it is a fair assurance that since the earth is the 
Lord's and the fulness thereof, those who seek to know his 
will and do it, those who seek to govern their lives by his 
laws, have better reason for expecting to live out their lives, 
and to know the fulness of life, than those who despise his 
laws and work to overthrow his Kingdom. That has 
always been true, I believe, and it is more obviously true to- 
day than it ever was before. 

It was never so plain as it is now, that the way of right- 
eousness is the way of life. There was a day, not many 
years ago, when there was doubt about this in many minds. 
The rewards of iniquity were flaunted in the sight of the 
populace and many eyes were dazzled by them. But that 
glitter is greatly blurred today; we are not so envious of the 
portion of the evil-doers as once we were; a clearer vision 
has come to us; the verb to succeed has passed into a new 
conjugation. And I hope that many of those who listen 
to me are ready to believe that there is, after all, no surer 
road to life and happiness than to put first things first, and 
to trust in the promise of the Father that all needful things 
will be added unto us. 



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XII 
OUTDOOR RELIGION 



XII 
OUTDOOR RELIGION 

On that day went Jesus out of the house, and sat by the 
seaside. — Matt. 13:1. 

This was not an exceptional day in the life of the Master. 
I have taken this verse for my text because it is descriptive 
of his practise as a teacher. Nearly all his ministry was 
exercised out-of-doors. We know, indeed, that his earlier 
ministry he spoke occasionally in the synagogues, the meet- 
ing houses of the Jews, in the cities and villages; but these 
were open only on the Sabbath; we have a few instances 
of his teaching in the houses of his friends, and once or 
twice he spoke in the temple-court at Jerusalem; but 
whether that was under the cover of the porches or in the 
open space in front of the temple, we do not know. For the 
greater part, however, his teaching and preaching were 
in the open air. His first great sermon, as reported in 
Matthew, was on the top of a mountain — probably the 
Kurn Hattin, on the west of the Sea of Galilee. Often he 
was in the wilderness — in the uninhabited country, in 
the rocky fastnesses round about Judea, where the multitude 
sought him out and listened to his message. More often 
we find him by the lakeside, in Galilee, where steep and 

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THE INTERPRETER 

curving banks formed a natural amphitheater on which his 
auditors sat while he found his pulpit in a fishing-boat 
which he pushed off a little from the shore. It is evident, 
from the narrative, that much the greater part of his public 
ministry was an out-door ministry. He must have lived 
and slept out-of-doors a good part of the time; and the 
congregations to which he spoke were probably too large 
to have been accommodated in any meeting houses then 
accessible. No structure of any sort was ever erected, so 
far as we know, for his use as a public teacher. 

The climate of Palestine was favorable to such an out-of- 
door ministry, for from March to November there was little 
rain, the summers were warm and the air was dry. We as- 
sociate the ministry of Jesus, therefore, with the open air. 
Probably it rarely occurs to us to picture him as speaking 
or teaching indoors. On the mountain top, in the Jordan 
valley, on the shores of the Galilean lake, under the shadow 
of a great rock by the wayside, we see him sitting in the 
midst of the throngs, some of them reclining on the grass, 
some of them leaning on their staves and listening to his 
simple and convincing words. The breezes are playing 
with his hair, the birds are chirping in the branches over- 
head, the little waves are rippling on the beach at his feet, 
the overarching sky bends down with its benediction. 
Some such scene as this naturally presents itself to our minds 
when we think of the ministry of Jesus in Judea and in 
Galilee. 

I cannot help thinking that this fact has some significance 

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OUTDOOR RELIGION 

for the lives of all of us. For the central elements in the 
life of Jesus were normal elements. It is not rational to 
say that his manner of life is in all respects to be slavishly 
imitated by all of us, for we cannot all devote three years of 
our lives as he devoted three years of his to public ministry; 
but when we find such a phenomenon as this open-air ^.fe 
and ministry of his, it may well suggest to us the value of 
life out-of-doors. To say the least, it must have been in 
harmony with his thoughts and purposes; he must have 
felt at home, when he was living out-of-doors; that kind 
of background set off the pictures he was making of the 
better life for men; these surroundings did not contradict 
but confirmed the lessons he was trying to teach. It 
might be interesting to read through the chapter of which 
the text is the first verse. And I think we may safely 
make him responsible for the suggestion, that for all men 
and women who wish to five the best fives, it is good to 
spend as much time as possible out-of-doors. 

Very likely this may get to be, in some cases, a fad. It is 
hard to keep life free from fads. There is a bit of satire 
in one of the late magazines on " The Passing of Indoors," 
which may have some justification. Shelter and protection 
and warmth and comfort are not, surely, in this climate, 
to be undervalued. Indoors will continue to have its uses 
and its charms for all sensible people, and most of us, if we 
order our fives wisely, will spend most of our hours under 
shelter. Nevertheless there are large uses for out-of-doors 
— larger than most of us have hitherto known. 

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THE INTERPRETER 

One reason why Jesus went out of the house and taught 
by the sea and on the mountain top is expressed in that 
great saying of his: "I am come that they might have life 
and might have it abundantly." It is entirely clear that 
he used that word life in its most comprehensive sense. 
He wanted men to be thoroughly alive in spirit and soul 
and body. " Wilt thou be made whole? " was his question 
to many an invalid. Whole men, men with every organ and 
every faculty in healthy and vigorous operation, were the 
final cause of all his endeavors. A large part of his work 
consisted in the repairing of broken frames and the re- 
plenishing of enfeebled powers. And I suppose that he 
knew by his divine intuition how much outdoor life was 
worth to the multitudes who followed him. They could 
not think healthily, wish worthily, choose sanely, unless 
their lungs were expanded with pure air and their veins 
were filled with red blood. By keeping them out-of-doors, 
in the open air, he helped many of them to win health and 
vigor, and made it easier for them to find the true path, to 
resist temptation, and to live good lives. 

For similar reasons many of us find it profitable to live 
as much as we can in the open air. The fresh-air cure is 
something more than a fad; the soundest of hygienic 
principles is behind it. The primary physical need is air 
to breathe; there was good foundation for the belief 
which is embodied in many languages that air is life. In 
the old Creation hymn, it was when his Creator breathed 
into man the breath of life that he became a living soul. 

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OUTDOOR RELIGION 

Of all the conditions of existence this is most immediate 
and imperative. We can do without food for many days; 
we can dispense with light for years, but air we must have 
in abundance, every minute. And there is enough of it. 
What a glorious provision is made for this our largest need! 
The planet is swathed in it, invisible oceans of it fill all the 
space round about us; we never find ourselves considering 
the possibility of the failure of the air-supply. The 
most important of all our needs is this, and the provision is 
most abundant; the wisdom and love of an infinite Giver 
are revealed in it. 

Happily its pervasive power is as notable as its abundance. 
There are no spaces above or under the earth which it 
does not swiftly occupy; no enclosures into which it does 
not promptly find its way. It is difficult to create a 
vacuum. Into cellars and caverns and basements and 
windowless rooms it forces an entrance; it would be hard 
for any man to find a place upon the face of the earth where 
air was not. 

Nevertheless, there are many enclosures where it does 
not exist in its purity; it is possible, by confining it, to 
poison it or devitalize it so that it shall fail to sustain life. 
And often the air which we breathe indoors, in our shops 
and stores and offices and churches and theaters and 
parlors and bedchambers, is so laden with noxious gases 
and so vitiated with germs that it fulfils very imperfectly 
its vital function. From all such perils our refuge is 
out-of-doors. 

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THE INTERPRETER 

For the most part the great reservoir of life which encom- 
passes the globe is kept pure and untainted. There are, 
it is true, sections into which men are discharging so much 
smoke and dust and poisonous vapor that the atmosphere 
becomes mephitic; and there are swamps and jungles 
where, for the want of human intervention, miasm is ex- 
haled and the atmosphere becomes pestilential; but 
these are occasional and sporadic defilements; for the 
most part the outdoor air is pure and wholesome and 
life-giving. And when we go out under the open canopy 
and look up into the infinite blue, we have some sense of the 
greatness of his bounty who gives us life, and gives it 
abundantly. It is only twenty-five or thirty miles in 
depth, they say, this invisible ocean through whose trans- 
parent currents we gaze upward to the sun and the stars; 
only twenty-five or thirty miles in depth, but that would 
appear to be an entirely adequate supply for all the needs 
of dwellers on earth's surface. 

The other vital physical need of human beings is sun- 
shine. The need is not so instant, so urgent as the need of 
air to breathe, but for health and vigor and happiness it is 
imperative. It is easier to exclude it from our enclosures 
and habitations than it is to exclude the air, but we suffer 
if we deprive ourselves of it. We have substitutes for it 
by which we contrive to do much of our work, but it is not 
good for any of us to be strangers to the sunshine. 

These, then, are two of the primal physical needs of 
human beings. If we are to have life and to have it abun- 

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OUTDOOR RELIGION 

dantly we must have an unstinted supply of air and sun- 
shine. And we find them in their fullness out-of-doors. 
It is only there that we can put ourselves within reach of the 
plenitude of this provision. 

Many intelligent people are coming to understand the 
relation of this outdoor life to human well-being, and there 
has been within the past quarter of a century a great in- 
crease of the extent to which the well-to-do classes spend 
their time in the open air. All this is calculated to be 
beneficial, physically, and mentally, and morally. We can 
easily overdo the business, as I have said, for there are many 
precious occupations and interests which require sheltering 
roofs and enclosing walls; but there can be no doubt that 
the well-being of the race is promoted by keeping all the 
people well acquainted with God's great out-of-doors. 

If we, who have some leisure to study the conditions of 
our own well-being, know that this is good for us, then we 
must be well aware that it is equally the need of those who 
are less able than we are to choose the conditions of their 
own lives. If men must have plenty of air and plenty of 
sunshine in order that they may have life and have it 
abundantly, then it behooves us to see to it, that so far as 
we can compass it by our social arrangements, all the people 
for whom we have any responsibility have free access to 
air and sunshine. Those who are doing the hard work of 
the world need these primal gifts of the Lord of life more 
urgently than any of the rest of us. 

It seems almost a crime that any man should be obliged 

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THE INTERPRETER 

to spend his days in severe toil, where air is tainted and 
sunshine never comes. Yet under present conditions it 
appears necessary that some should labor under this 
disability. The miners, underground, the stokers in the 
boiler rooms of the great steamships, and others on land 
in similar conditions, — are compelled to do their work 
away from the sunlight. I suppose that everything is done 
that can be done to keep them supplied with air to breathe, 
but even that is imperfectly accomplished, and the 
conditions under which their work must be carried on are at 
the very best deplorable. Society owes to such men a 
consideration and a sympathy which they do not always 
receive. 

No man can compute the magnitude of the boon which is 
granted to those who till the soil, whose work is almost all 
done in the open air. But there is the great multitude of 
those who work above ground, and who work within en- 
closures, and who must live within walls and under roofs, — 
of them we must think. For we may have much to do in 
establishing the conditions under which they must labor, 
and it behooves us all to do what we can to get an adequate 
supply of air and sunlight into all the places where they 
live and work. These are vital needs, and so far as we have 
influence and power we must see that they are provided for 
our neighbors, and especially for those who are imperfectly 
aware of their value. Our civilization will surely prove to 
be a decadent civilization if it does not look out sharply 
for the vital needs of its toiling classes. 

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OUTDOOR RELIGION 

And not only ought we to see to it that the enclosures in 
which men work, and the rooms in which they live are well 
supplied with light and air, we ought also to see that they 
have large opportunity of getting the full benefits of God's 
great out-of-doors. There is one thing which we can do 
for them and which, at no distant day, I am persuaded 
that we shall do, — we can give them not only pure water 
to drink, we can give them also purer air to breathe. One 
who sits in the top story of one of our tall buildings and 
sees the columns of black smoke rising all over our city, 
and who witnesses, as I did the other day, the onset of a 
windstorm which drives this smoke horizontally down 
upon the roofs and through the streets and thus blots 
from sight homes and stores and factories and churches, 
smothering them in its sooty embrace, has a conception of 
what we are daily breathing into our lungs and finding 
lodgment for on our walls and floors and book-cases. 
Some of us can get away from the worst of this nuisance, 
but there are many who must live in the midst of it. I 
am sure that the time must be near when we shall abate 
it. We know how to do it now; nothing is needed but that 
we should resolutely apply our knowledge. A good many 
of our fellow men have to content themselves with bits of 
outdoor life; we are bound to make those fragments 
as precious to them as they can be made. It is impossible 
that our neighbors should have life and have it abundantly 
so long as we are pouring into the air which they breathe 
such enormous quantities of carbon dioxid. 

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THE INTERPRETER 

But it was not only for the health of their bodies that 
Jesus led his followers out-of-doors. It was good for their 
minds also, and for their souls, that they should spend some 
good portion of their lives in the open air. For our morbid 
sentiments it is medicinal, for our perverted ideas it is 
disciplinary to get out from between the walls within which 
we have immured ourselves into the open, and out from 
under the roofs that deny the sky to where there is nothing 
that can contradict the infinite blue. Nor is it essential 
that we surround ourselves with the more sublime mani- 
festations of external nature, — with towering mountains 
or rolling oceans, or plunging cataracts. 

Sometimes it seems to me that these exceptional phe- 
nomena rather stun and confuse our insights. I am not 
sure that out-of-doors is not worth more to us in its com- 
monplace aspects — the green fields, the winding streams, 
the waiting forests, the birds in the copses, the sky and the 
clouds. No matter how barren the landscape, always 
there is the sky overhead, and where the earth is most 
sullen the smile of the sky is often loveliest. If you will 
only find a place where the mighty cope in all its breadth 
stretches above your head, and will simply lie down in 
the shade and let it speak to you, you may hear something 
greatly to your advantage. 

No wonder the Romans came to identify the sky with 
deity and to call it Jove; when its searching eye looks down 
on a man he is humbled and made reverent. And how much 
there is in its most familiar aspects to kindle our wonder 

214 



OUTDOOR RELIGION 

and our admiration! " The noblest scenes of the earth," 

says John Ruskin, " can be seen and known but by few; 

it is not intended that man should live always in the midst 

of them; he injures them by his presence, he ceases to feel 

them if he be always with them; but the sky is for all; 

bright as it is, it is not 

' Too bright, or good 
For human nature's daily food' ; 

it is fitted in all its functions for the perpetual comfort and 
exalting of the heart, for the soothing and purifying it from 
its dross and dust. Sometimes gentle, sometimes capri- 
cious, sometimes awful, never the same for two moments 
together, almost human in its passions, almost spiritual in 
its tenderness, almost divine in its infinity, its appeal to 
what is immortal in us is as distinct as its ministry of 
chastisement or of blessing to what is mortal is essential. 
... It is not in the broad and fierce manifestations of the 
elemental energies, nor in the crash of the hail, nor 
the drift of the whirlwind that the highest characters of the 
sublime are developed. God is not in the earthquake, nor 
in the fire, but in the still, small voice. They are but the 
blunt and low faculties of our nature which can only be 
addressed through lampblack and lightning. It is in quiet 
and subdued passages of unobtrusive majesty, the deep, 
the calm, and the perpetual, — that must be sought ere 
it is seen, and loved ere it is understood, — things which 
the angels work out for us daily, yet vary eternally; which 
are never wanting, and never repeated; which are to be 

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THE INTERPRETER 

found always yet found but once, — it is through these 

that the lesson of devotion is chiefly taught, and the blessing 

of beauty given." 

And if the sky by day with its blue infinities and its 

vapory traceries and its miraculous cloud piles can speak 

thus to our spirits, how much more solemnly by night do 

its inarticulate voices sound in the depths of every serious 

mind: 

" Plainness and clearness without shadow of stain, 
Clearness divine! 

Ye heavens, whose pure regions have no sign 
Of languor, though so calm, and though so great, 
Are yet untroubled and impassionate; 
Who, though so noble, share in the world's toil, 
And, though so task'd, keep free from dust and soil! 
I will not say that your mild depths retain 
A tinge, it may be, of their silent pain 
Who have longed deeply once and longed in vain, — 
But I will rather say that j^ou remain 
A world above man's head to let him see 
How boundless might his soul's horizons be, 
How vast, yet of what clear transparency! 
How it were good to live there, and breathe free! 
How fair a lot to fill 
Is left to each man still! " 

These summer days have great gifts in store for us if we 
can only put ourselves into the right attitude before these 
august instructors and let them tell us what we need to 
know. For they are our teachers, and we are not blameless 
if their counsel fails to find us. 

The heavens declare the glory of God 
And the firmament showeth his handiwork. 

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OUTDOOR RELIGION 

Day unto day uttereth speech 

And night unto night showeth knowledge." 

And though " there is no audible speech nor language, 
and their voice is not heard by the ear of sense," yet " their 
line is gone out through all the earth and their words to 
the end of the world." There is no place so lonely that we 
cannot hear these voices; when the din of traffic and the 
chatter of conversation are far away these revealing and 
quickening utterances begin to be audible, — never till 
then. 

I greatly fear that many of us know far too little of the 
help that might come to us from these high sources. It is 
not often that we lift our eyes to the hills or to the sky; 
for such companionship we find ourselves strangely unfit. 
We are so constantly with others that we almost dread to 
be alone; it is a pitiful weakness; and thus we miss the 
profoundest and most momentous communications, for 
these only come to us when we are in solitude, and when the 
deep without is calling into the deep within. It is not an 
unkind wish for any of you, I am sure, when I say that I 
hope that all of you may find during this beautiful summer, 
many hours for silent and fruitful companionship with 
forest and field and river, with the glory of clouds and the 
steadfastness of stars and the strength and the peace of the 
everlasting hills. 



217 



XIII 
THE CALL OF THE DEEP 



XIII 
THE CALL OF THE DEEP 

Put out into the deep, and let down your nets for 
a draught. — Luke 5 : 4- 

Peter and James and John had been fishing all night in 
the Galilean lake, and had caught nothing. In the early 
morning their Master appeared to them, and using their 
boat for a pulpit spoke, for a little while, to a congregation 
which had gathered on the beach. " And when he had left 
speaking he said unto Simon, Put out into the deep, and 
let down your nets for a draught.'' The result of obedience 
to that suggestion was a surprising haul of fishes. The 
fact seems to be that the fishermen had been hugging the 
shore and fishing in shallow water; when they got out into 
deeper water they found the fish. 

This is sometimes described as " the miraculous draught 
of fishes." There is no hint in the narrative of anything 
supernatural. If it was a miraculous occurrence it can 
have no lesson in it for you and me, for we know that no 
miracles are going to be wrought for us when we go a-fish- 
ing. I prefer therefore to regard it as a natural event; 
and to say that the poor luck of the fisherman was due to 
the fact that they had been fishing in the wrong place, 

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THE INTERPRETER 

and that their big haul is explained by the fact that at the 
suggestion of their Lord they went where the fish were. 
Indeed, I prefer to use the incident as a similitude. I 
would not say that it teaches or was meant to teach the 
lesson that I shall draw from it; I only say that it aptly 
illustrates certain facts of human life to which I wish to 
draw attention. 

The error and the foolishness of keeping too near shore, 
of dabbling in the shallows, when the depths are inviting us 
to braver enterprises and nobler gains — this is the signifi- 
cance I choose to find in the words before us. 

It is clear that the fisherman may greatly err as these 
apostolic fishermen seem to have erred, by plying his trade 
in the shallow waters. The best fish are not found there. 
He may catch a few minnows in the coves and a few cun- 
ners from the rocks; but if he expects to win the haddock 
or the cod or the bluefish, he must go out to sea, beyond the 
line of the breakers. The counsel which the Master gave 
to his disciples embodies the wisdom which the fisher-folk 
in all the generations have gained from experience. This 
means more work, more risk, more exposure; timid folk 
and lazy folk are fain to keep near shore; but those who 
expect to succeed in their craft must not be afraid to put 
out into the deep. 

Even to the swimmer this counsel is often wise. One 
reason why some people never learn to swim is that they 
never venture into water that is deep enough to swim in. 
They stand forever paddling and shivering in the water 

222 



THE CALL OF THE DEEP 

that is only knee deep and never strike out into the depths 
where swimming is possible. 

The navigators, also, have been admonished by the same 
maxim. For them there could have been no such conquests 
of space as they have won if they had hesitated to put out 
into the deep. For many ages, no doubt, after the first 
hollowed log floated the first navigator, the timorsome 
sailors hugged the shore, and the coasting trade was the 
only maritime trade. Until the compass was invented, it 
was hardly safe to be out of sight of land. But navigation 
that is tied to the coast is flight with a clipped wing. It is 
dangerous, for one thing: rocks and shoals abound, and a 
stiff wind from the offing may at any time drive your 
craft upon the breakers. The one thing that the sailor is 
most afraid of is the shore with its shallows. He never 
feels safe till he is out of sight of land. 

The great achievements, the great discoveries, the great 
additions to human knowledge and opportunity, are not 
for those who cling to the shore and the shallow water, 
but only for those who have the courage and the enterprise 
to launch out upon the deep. The old Norsemen who had 
won daring and hardihood by battling with wind and wave 
in their own tempestuous seas, and were thus emboldened 
to sail westward in search of other harbors; the Phoeni- 
cians, whose mastery of the Mediterranean had equipped 
and stimulated them to push beyond the Pillars of Hercules 
into an uncharted sea, were the protagonists of this enter- 
prise of discovery, of which the great Genoese was the most 

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THE INTERPRETER 

illustrious leader. What sent Columbus forth on his 
mighty errand? Knowledge and faith were blended in 
the impulse that moved him — the new astronomy which 
had convinced him that the earth was spherical, and that 
the east could be reached by sailing west, and the faith 
that he could open a new way to the old world, and add 
new kingdoms to the empire of the Christ. It was no 
narrow impulse of selfishness or greed that had stirred him 
up, it was a large thought and a great loyalty which were 
struggling together in his breast. These were the voices 
which kept calling him to launch out into the deep. That 
great venture upon an uncharted sea was vindicated in a 
marvellous way. In searching for the old world he found 
a new one, whose existence had been hitherto unsuspected 
by the wise men; he added a continent to the resources of 
mankind. But all this was the fruit of the impulse which 
lured him away from the solid land and the familiar shores, 
away into the unknown deep. 

These illustrations will indicate that here is a law of life 
with which we may have to reckon. 

It is not always wise or profitable — it is not always 
safe — to cling to the shores and the shallows; it is some- 
times the best thing we can do to launch out into the deep. 
The instincts of prudence and self-preservation may power- 
fully dissuade us from taking that risk; but we have to 
learn that those instincts are not always our surest guides. 
I do not say that they are never to be trusted; they have 
their use; we do not well when we wholly despise their 

224 



THE CALL OF THE DEEP 

admonitions. Here, as everywhere, we are beset with con- 
flicting motives, whose action upon us we must learn to 
harmonize and combine. 

It is a sane instinct which makes a human being dread 
the sea and cling to the shore; but it is a higher and diviner 
instinct which makes him look away to that far horizon 
and wonder what is beyond it, and resolve to know. The 
faith and courage which stir him up to defy the danger and 
despise the toil, that he may gain a good beyond his sight, 
are nobler elements than those self-regarding ones which 
would tie him to the land. His greatest gains have been 
won in such ventures. It is the divine voice which bids 
him forsake the shallows and launch out into the deep. 

This is true of his intellectual life. As a thinker man 
stands on the shores of sense confronting an infinite ocean 
of being. He knows, or seems to know, the things that are 
revealed to him by his senses; and the inclination some- 
times grows strong to make the senses the test of his knowl- 
edge; to bring all his experiences under their jurisdiction 
and to make them the arbiters of all truth. 

There are thus a good many thinkers who insist on keep- 
ing very close to shore in all their thinking; they are only 
waders, or at best coasters, and they must stay where they 
can touch bottom; they are neither swimmers nor naviga- 
tors; they have not learned to trust themselves to the 
depths. There are those to whom science means only 
what can be verified by physical measurements, what can 
be weighed or counted. Thus Mr. Huxley, in one of his 

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THE INTERPRETER 

earlier addresses, quoted Hume as saying: " If we take in 
hand any volume of divinity, or school metaphysics, for 
instance, let us ask : Does it contain any abstract reasoning 
concerning quantity, or number? No. Does it contain 
any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact 
and existence? No. Commit it, then, to the flames, for 
it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion." To 
which Mr. Huxley adds, " Permit me to enforce this most 
wise advice. Why trouble ourselves about matters of 
which, however important they may be, we do know nothing 
and can know nothing? " 

I do not think that Mr. Huxley was always quite so 
near-sighted as this, but here he shows himself a very 
narrow thinker. This dictum of Hume's, which he so 
unreservedly endorses, is not, surely, what he calls it, 
" most wise advice." Take the Sermon on the Mount. 
It contains no abstract reasoning concerning quantity 
and number and no experimental reasoning concerning 
matter of fact and existence. Shall we therefore say that 
it contains nothing but sophistry and illusion? Take the 
four chapters of John's Gospel beginning with the four- 
teenth; take the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians; 
take the Twenty-third Psalm or the One Hundred and 
Twenty-first Psalm, or the fortieth chapter of Isaiah, — 
and apply Hume's test to them. None of them can 
by any stretch of terms be brought within his cate- 
gories. Shall we commit them all to the flames? Or take 
Wordsworth's " Tintern Abbey," and his " Ode to Duty," 

226 



THE CALL OF THE DEEP 

and Tennyson's " The Ancient Sage," or Browning's 
"Saul," or Lowell's " Cathedral," or Emerson's "The 
World Soul," — nay, take Emerson's essay on " Com- 
pensation," or " Spiritual Laws," or Carlyle's " Sartor 
Resartus "; you will not find in any of them " any ab- 
stract reasoning concerning quantity or number," or 
" any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact 
or existence"; are they, therefore, unfit to engage the 
thoughts of rational men? 

In truth the subjects which cannot be subjected to such 
tests are the very subjects best worth thinking about, and 
the people whose minds are always tethered to the things of 
sense are people from whom we need not hope to get 
any inspiring messages. It is not when the man is sticking 
close to the shores of sense and subjecting all his impres- 
sions to physical tests that the great words are being spoken 
to him; it is rather in those moments when, within himself, 
he perceives 

" A grace of being finer than himself, 
That beckons and is gone, — a larger life 
Upon his own impinging, with swift glimpse 
Of spacious circles luminous with mind, 
To which the etherial substance of his own 
Seems but gross cloud to make that visible, 
Touched to a sudden glory round the edge " ; 

it is rather when he feels 

" A presence that disturbs him with the joy 
Of elevated thoughts: a sense sublime 
Of something far more deeply interfused, 
Whose dwelling is the fight of setting suns, 

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THE INTERPRETER 

And the round ocean and the living air, 
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; 
A motion and a spirit that impels 
All thinking things, all objects of all thought, 
And rolls through all things." 

A man is a poor and dull thinker whose thinking does not 
bring his mind into contact with these things unseen and 
eternal by which his life is beleaguered. He is one of those 
who are quite too well content to wade in the shoals along 
the beach or paddle his canoe over the creeks and coves, 
and who does not trust himself to the great spaces of the 
rolling deep. For him there are no great discoveries; 
he will add no continents to the intellectual resources of 
mankind. It is only those who are not afraid to lose sight 
of land, and to sail away over the boundless deep of the 
eternal purpose, with only the stars overhead, to whom the 
great things of God are ever revealed. 

" Scorning the narrow measure of individual wants," 
says Dr. Martineau, " human curiosity flies out, and with 
wing more eager as the air grows strange, unto fields 
remotest from the homesteads of personal and social life. 
To go forth and see where the stars are, and how they lie; 
to get round them and dive into the fountain of their light; 
to frustrate their eternal silence and make them tell their 
paths; to pass from station to station and gain assurance 
that there is no end to their geometry; and then to drop 
back on the grass-plot of this world, mentally sublimed by 
the sense of human insignificance, has ever had a solemn 
charm for human intelligence. . . . Carrying in ourselves 

228 



THE CALL OF THE DEEP 

secret relationships with universal space and unbeginning 
time through Him that fills them both and lives in us, we 
know the tidings which come furthest from them to be 
nearest to us; they remind us of our augustest kindred; 
they free us from our momentary prison; they show us the 
white sail, they breathe on us with the very wind that shall 
take us out of exile. Their awful fascination bespeaks a 
nature mysteriously blending in its affections the finite and 
the infinite, and standing on the confines of both." 

But the counsel of the text is most pertinent in its applica- 
tion to the moral realm — to the concerns of conduct and 
character. Here, more than anywhere else, the weakness 
and folly of clinging to the shore and dabbling in the 
shallows makes itself manifest. 

Might we not truly say that the prime characteristic of 
much of our modern life is its shallowness? Is not this the 
trouble with the multitude; that there is no depth to their 
convictions or their affections? The Preacher, in the old 
Hebrew satire, represents himself as one who had gathered 
all kinds of material good and of sensuous pleasure, and 
who had found it full of emptiness; and he summed up all 
this experience of mammonism and sybaritism in the 
bitter words: " Then I looked on all the works that my 
hands had wrought, and on the labor that I had labored 
to do, and behold all was vanity and a striving after wind, 
and there was no profit under the sun." 

The modern novelists are sometimes skillful reporters 
of social conditions and tendencies. In the words of 

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THE INTERPRETER 

one of the witnesses to whom this high life has been 
familiar : 

"It is this same amateurishness in everything, — this 
complete inefficiency, that is the dominant note of the lives 
and characters of our women of fashion. They can't 
sing, they can't dance, they can't act, they can't paint, 
they can't sew, they can't cook, they can't educate. They 
are inept, unthorough, inconsequential, rudderless, com- 
passless, drifting. They don't know life, because they have 
never lived life. They are like perpetual typhoid fever 
patients, supported always on rubber water mattresses. 
Helpless, hapless, hopeless, nervous, disappointed, cloyed 
and cowardly, they exist a few years here, seeking to have 
all their living done for them by paid dependents. 

1 1 And yet,' said one of the women who listened without 
dissent to their indictment, ' there must be some strong, 
resistless fascination, under all this superficial, frothy 
glitter that draws us on. For even we, who in our hearts 
realize the inanity of the whole thing, yet patiently grind 
on until our last hours upon this weary, golden treadmill. 
Can you explain that? ' 

" [She] dropped her chin into her hand and thought. ' I 
do not believe,' she said, finally, ' that its lure is so com- 
pelling because it is strong, as because you are weak. But 
that is not your fault. Life is so ordered for you that you 
have no chance to be anything but weak.' " 

Is it not a melancholy picture of the kind of existence 
after which a very large part of the people of this land, rich 

230 



THE CALL OF THE DEEP 

and poor, are eagerly reaching out? I suppose that many- 
people have a notion that such life as this is ampler and 
wider than that of ordinary mortals; but the impression 
of its exceeding narrowness grows on one who reads these 
records. It is chained to earth. The conventions and 
exactions become cramping and tyrannous. It is a tread- 
mill, as that victim confesses. These poor people are 
huddled together on the shores of life's wide ocean, upon 
whose depths of experience they never venture, whose wide 
ranges of pure enjoyment they never know. And before 
the end comes they are as sure as the preacher was in 
Ecclesiastes that there is nothing in it. The hero of one 
of these books thus confesses, on the last page. He says 
that he has made good in the great game of accumulation; 
he declares that he is "on Easy Street"; when his old 
friend challenges him : 

" Look at me and tell me, now that you have achieved 
your heart's desire, if it has been worth while. 

" For a long time he hesitated. ' No,' he answered, 
slowly and with reluctance. ' It has not been worth while. 
My whole life is a horrible lie, a poisonous blunder, a 
soul-destroyer. Sometimes I catch a vision of the truth, 
but always I turn away from it quickly, or I couldn't 
keep on.' 

" Why must you keep on? Why don't you turn to the 
truth, even if you see it only sometimes? You will see 
it oftener as you move toward it. 

" He shook his head. ' I can't. I know it's all rotten 

231 



THE INTERPRETER 

and false, but it's too late to change. I am nearly forty 
years old. My life is settled; my ways are fixed. It is 
too late.' " 

Poor fellow! He has toiled all night and has taken 
nothing. And when the word comes to put out into the 
deep and let down the net in the great waters, his hope and 
courage are gone. 

It is not, I fear, the denizens of the house of mirth alone 
to whom this truth applies. Few of us here belong in 
that class, though some of us, if the truth about us were 
known, would be mighty glad to get into it. But, if we 
have no such expectations, is it not true of many of us that 
we are altogether too well content to cling to the shores and 
the shallows of existence, and that we know far less than 
we ought to know of the great deep of human experience 
always inviting us and the rich islands and continents whose 
shores it washes. 

Upon this strand of Time we sit and life, like a mighty 
ocean, rolls before us. That ocean represents to us the 
infinite wisdom and love of God. That great deep is 
always in sight; its buoyant waters invite us, its vast 
distances beckon to us, its tides of life are always breaking 
at our feet. To one who lives upon the shore of the Atlan- 
tic or the Pacific, that mighty expanse would surely be the 
greatest fact of his earthly environment. It would be 
always present; he could not ignore it; it would become a 
part of his consciousness. And so, it seems to me, it 
ought to be with all of us who stand forever in sight of the 

232 



THE CALL OF THE DEEP 

Eternal. In that august presence we are always standing. 
For all these things which we see are but the mask He wears : 
the forces of nature are weaving the garment which con- 
ceals while it reveals him. 

'' Earth, these solid stars, this weight of body and limb. 
Are they not sign and symbol of thy division from him? 

" Dark is the world to thee? thyself art the reason why; 
For is he not all but thee, who hast power to feel ' I am I.' 

" Glory about thee, without thee, and thou fulfillest thy doom, 
Making him broken gleams, and a stifled splendor and gloom." 

What a marvellous thing is life, this human life of ours! 
How high are its relationships, how vast are its possibili- 
ties. Now are we the children of God, and it doth not 
appear what we may be! 

■• Infinite of joy and light 

Wherewith we are surrounded. 
We lift our spirits to thy height, 

Unf athomed and unbounded : 
Thy greatness drowns our petty cares. 
Thy heaven is in us. unawares. 

" Infinite of righteousness. 

Breath of our inmost being, 
Thy purity will cleanse and bless 

The soul from evil fleeing : 
We hide our sin-stained hearts in thee 
And pray, *As Thou art, let us be.' " 

Yes. that is what we ought to say: that is the right re- 
sponse of the soul, when the greatness and the nearness of 
God is revealed to the need of man. 

233 



THE INTERPRETER 

But alas, how little these great things are apt to stir us. 
We are the children of Eternity, but we are investing all our 
resources in the things of time and sense, in the goods that 
perish with the using. " Deep calleth unto deep " is the 
Psalmist's poetic confession. The ocean of being without 
appeals to the depths of life within. The macrocosm 
summons the microcosm. The Infinite of Truth and Good- 
ness by which we are surrounded speaks to our conscious- 
ness in tones that ought to thrill us. Yet how heedless we 
are of this great appeal. Our ears are closed when its 
voices call, when its fair distances beckon our eyes are 
turned away. We are fishing for minnows in the creeks 
and coves, we are wading in the little pools that the tide 
has left along the beach. We are trying to satisfy our souls 
with interests that are of the earth earthy. It is not what 
we are made for; our destinies are cut to a larger pattern; 
our powers cannot find exercise in such an environment. 
It is like trying to run an electrical engine with the vapor 
of tepid water; it is like asking Curtis to fly his aeroplane 
in a Dutch barn; it is like trying to sail the New Mexico in 
Alumn Creek. The human soul was not intended to confine 
itself to such interests; it is tuned to larger harmonies, 
it is plumed for wider flights. " Thou hast made us for 
thyself," cried Augustine, " and our souls are restless until 
they rest in thee." 

" Many a man," says Professor Peabody, " is ineffec- 
tive because he does not let down his nets as deep as they 
were meant to go. If, as he looks back on life, he were to 

234 



THE CALL OF THE DEEP 

name his chief regret, it would be not so much his wicked- 
ness as his shallowness; the failure to use life at its best, 
the small use of the great opportunity, the dabbling in the 
shoals of experience instead of sailing into its deeps. He 
has sat on the shore of experience, timid, self-distrustful, 
indolent, fancying himself not fit to go far from land, and so 
all his days he has lived like a child playing in the sand, 
while men no better than he have done their business in 
great waters. To such a life comes this call of Jesus. 
This is not what you were made for. . . . One must take 
chances if he would use life for all it is worth. It is often 
as easy to do a great thing as a small one. Launch out 
into the deep." 

I know not whether I have succeeded in making audible 
to any of you the call of the deep which summons us all to 
larger ventures and braver enterprises. I am sure that 
there is for you and me a better destiny than we have ever 
known, if we but dare to trust ourselves to God, and com- 
mit our souls with no. reserve to his great purposes. It 
seems hard for us to cut loose from the land — to relinquish 
our hold on the small expediencies on which we have been 
resting, and make that great act of faith by which our 
wills are made one with the Perfect will; but after all, 
the ship was made for the sea, not for the dock; and the 
hour of her deliverance comes when the cables are loosed 
and she turns her prow to the dim horizon. 

" To some thou givest at ease to lie 
Content in anchored happiness; 

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THE INTERPRETER 

Thy breath my full sail swelling, I 

Across thy broadening seas would press. 

" At friendly shores, at peaceful isles, 
I touch but may not long delay, 
Where thy flushed East with mystery smiles 
I sail into the unrisen day. 

" For veils of hope before thee drawn, 

For mists that hint the immortal coast 
Hid in thy farthest, faintest dawn, — 
My God, for these I thank thee most. 

" J°y> j°y' to see from every shore 

Whereon my step makes pressure fond, 
Thy sunrise reddening still before! — 

More light, more love, more life beyond! " 



236 



XIV 
BLESSING AND BANNING 



XIV 
BLESSING AND BANNING 

And he opened his mouth and taught them saying, 
Blessed. — Matt. 5 : 2, 3. 

Here beginneth " The Sermon on the Mount/' the first, 
the longest and the most comprehensive of our Master's 
reported discourses. It has been described as the Magna 
Charta of Christianity; it certainly does set forth, with 
great fullness, the fundamental tenets of Christian faith and 
duty. What I desire to consider with you today is the first 
word of this sermon. There seems to be some significance 
in the fact that it is the first word. It has the emphasis 
of position. Those who heard this discourse could hardly 
have forgotten what was the first word of the first sermon. 
Within the next minute or two they heard this first word 
seven times repeated, each time the emphatic word of the 
sentence. It must have made a profound impression on 
their minds. They must have assumed that in this word 
they were listening to the keynote of this Teacher's mes- 
sage. The word was " Blessed." It was a benediction, a 
congratulation. It was a recognition of the good qualities 
in those to whom he was speaking a word of encouragement. 
May we not suppose that those who listened must have felt 

239 



THE INTERPRETER 

that this preacher was fixing his eyes on that which was 
best in themselves, and drawing their own attention to it 
and giving them the meed of his approval? Must they not 
have gained the impression that the method of this teacher 
would largely be appreciation and recognition, rather than 
censure and denunciation. 

That would, certainly, have been a different method from 
the one to which they had been accustomed. The law 
under which they had been living was mainly prohibitory. 
Of their decalogue all the commandments but one were 
prohibitions; and the tenor of all the teaching to which 
they were wont to listen was restraint, limitation, restric- 
tion. The greatest of the prophets was still speaking, and 
his message had been the fiercest reproof and denunciation. 
If he had found any good in the throngs whom he had been 
lashing by his invective he had forgotten to mention it. 

The Baptist had borne the strongest testimony to Jesus, 
and those who had been the Baptist's disciples must have 
come to the ministry of Jesus with eager expectations, but 
they must have felt that there was a marked contrast 
between the spirit of the Forerunner, and the spirit of the 
Master. The one had come to ban and the other to bless. 
The essential characteristic of the one ministry was almost 
radically unlike that of the other. Nevertheless we must 
not forget that Jesus himself afterward bore strong testi- 
mony to the value of the ministry of John. He said that of 
all the prophets of the old dispensation, John was the last 
and the greatest. 

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BLESSING AND BANNING 

Nor must we forget that elements of the ministry of 
John are found in the ministry of Jesus. Jesus sometimes 
found it necessary to invoke the severity of God as well as 
his goodness. Jesus sometimes denounced hypocrisy and 
selfishness in no measured terms, and brought the whole 
weight of his moral indignation to bear on men who were 
making void the law by their traditions and obstructing 
the progress of the Kingdom by their greed and their hard- 
ness of heart. So that we must learn to treat this matter 
with discrimination. We must not say that no words 
should ever be spoken to men but words of approval, for 
that is not so; there are things that must not be approved, 
that must be resolutely and unflinchingly opposed and con- 
demned. There are times for banning as well as for blessing. 
" In our spiritual husbandry there are pests to kill as well 
as plants to cultivate. It is all a question of proportion." 

The question is which method shall preponderate. 
Shall our chief reliance be on banning or on blessing. 
John's chief reliance was on banning, the chief reliance 
of Jesus was on blessing. And when Jesus says that John 
was the greatest of the prophets, but that the least of those 
in the Kingdom of heaven was greater than he, I suppose 
that he was thinking of just this difference, and that he 
meant to tell us that a feeble life whose strength was given 
to cherishing the good, was greater in God's sight than 
the most powerful life whose strength is spent in chastising 
the evil. And that I suppose, is the significance of these 
opening words of the great Sermon. 

241 



THE INTERPRETER 

There is something very tender, very moving in that 
scene on the wide plateau, between the two peaks, the 
Horns of Hattin, which overlook the little Galilean lake. 
Jesus had spent the night on one of those eminences, pray- 
ing; he had come down in the early morning to the level 
place on which the multitude had been gathering. The 
sun has climbed above the eastern hills, the waves of the 
lake below are dancing in its light, the birds are singing in 
the copses, the fresh breath of a summer morning is rustling 
in the grass. The throng has gathered there to listen to the 
Rabbi, and as he finds some elevated rock or grassy knoll, 
and seats himself, after the manner of Jewish teachers, there 
is silence. He bends forward, his hands are outstretched. 
Listen : 

Blessed! Blessed! Blessed! Blessed! All the light of 
this beautiful morning, all the melody of these bird songs, 
all the perfume of these lilies of the field, are mingled in this 
benediction. It is the Word of God who is speaking, 
it is the Word of God that is spoken. This is his message 
to the children of men. 

It is not a new message; we must not say that; for 
Isaiah and Hosea and many a prophet and psalmist had 
spoken it; but it is a new emphasis, and mighty things 
are wrought in this world of ours by changes of emphasis. 
And what I desire for you and for myself, is that we may 
catch the cadence of the Master's voice as he stands on the 
Mount of the Beatitudes, and get the tone and the meaning 
of it into our hearts. I wish that we could learn to know the 

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BLESSING AND BANNING 

power there is in this attitude of mind, the convincing and 
persuasive force there is in this habit of speech, which 
praises, appreciates, congratulates, instead of censuring, 
condemning, denouncing. 

Remember, remember, that I am not making any sweep- 
ing statements about this; sweeping statements generally 
sweep away a lot of precious truth. I recognize the fact 
that we shall be constrained frankly to disapprove and 
fearlessly to oppose many things and many people; I am 
only trying to see for myself, and to get you to see, that the 
staple of our teaching, and our preaching, and our work 
ought to be positive, constructive, helpful, friendly, rather 
than negative, critical, denunciatory; that it is far better 
for us and for the world that we keep ourselves in close 
and sympathetic relations with the good that is in the 
world, rejoicing in it, praising it, encouraging it, reinforcing 
it, than to be always watching and resisting and fighting the 
evil that is in the world. 

I have had some fighting to do, in my time, and may 
have more to do before I die; and if I had to live my life 
over I would by no means agree to keep silent about abuses 
and to shut my mouth in the presence of iniquities and op- 
pressions; but of this I am sure, — I would put a great deal 
more of my strength into the promotion and cherishing of 
the good that is in the world, and just as much less into the 
warfare with the evil that is in the world. I do not mean to 
admit that the larger proportion of my work has been on 
the wrong side of this proposition, for I believe that I have 

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THE INTERPRETER 

always been convinced that positive methods are better 
than negative; but that conviction has grown and ripened 
with my years and is much stronger now than it was 
when I began my ministry, so that if I could live my life 
over, and could begin where I am leaving off, J should put 
a great deal less faith than I have done in banning, and a 
great deal more in blessing. 

A good place to begin is in the family. In the treatment 
of our children appreciation and praise are far more effec- 
tive than fault-finding. I do not mean that the firm hand 
of authority should be withheld; the weak indulgence 
which prevails in so many modern households is pernicious 
and fatal. The notion that children should never be taught 
obedience; that they should be permitted to overturn and 
destroy the order and peace of the household in the gratifica- 
tion of their own selfish impulses, is a pestilent heresy; 
it will undermine the family and civilization itself. But 
a spineless parental regimen is one thing, and a vigilant 
recognition of the good in the child's character and conduct 
is quite another thing. You need not relax your demand 
that he conform to the law of the household and the ways 
of honor and virtue; but you may show him that you are 
keenly watching for all signs of truth and fidelity and kind- 
ness and courage and nobleness in his life; that these are 
the things you expect from him, and that you are not sur- 
prised but glad and proud when they appear. 

I have known few parents who held the ideals of good 
steadily before their children's minds, and kept watching 

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BLESSING AND BANNING 

for their reproduction in their children's lives who did not 
sooner or later find what they were looking for. I have 
known some parents whom their neighbors thought almost 
infatuated, so confident were they of a good outcome 
from the lives of quite unpromising children; and I have 
lived to see the parent's faith fully justified in many such 
cases. 

Watch for the good in your children's lives; watch for 
it, as the farmer watches for the wheat that he has sown 
and the corn that he has planted; have the same expecta- 
tion about it that he has. Don't watch for the cockle or 
the Canada thistles; such things may appear but they are 
not the things that you ought to be looking for; if you have 
a theology that inclines you to look for them, get rid of it, 
and get hold of a theology that warrants you in watching 
for good in your children's lives, and when you see it 
praise it, rejoice in it, and cherish it by every influence 
that you know how to use. Whatsoever things pure, true, 
lovely, honorable, or of good report you find in the speech 
or the deeds of your children, be glad of it, and let them 
know your gladness. You need not be effusive in your 
commendation, but you can make them understand that 
their well-doing not only gives you the keenest happiness, 
but justifies your steadfast faith in them. 

All of us know, alas, too many parents whose treatment 
of their children is precisely the reverse of all this; who are 
quick to see and reprove the evil, but slow to discern and 
commend the good; who seem to be watching for faults; 

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THE INTERPRETER 

whose fears for their children's misdoing seems to be stronger 
than their expectation of well-doing. It is a melancholy 
and a fatal attitude. 

O fathers and mothers, let us fill our minds with the 
spirit that finds utterance in this first word of the great 
Sermon ! Let us stand always in the presence of our chil- 
dren in this hopeful rejoicing, praising attitude. I have 
told you more than once that the one thing that all of us 
most need to do is to get well acquainted with our own 
better selves; the next thing, for all of us who are parents, 
is to get well acquainted with our children's better selves; 
to put ourselves in closest fellowship with all that is best 
in their lives; to cherish it, to rejoice in it, to applaud it, 
to magnify it; to make it plain that we consider this better 
self to be the real self, and expect to see it prevail over any 
less worthy tendencies. We must not, of course, fail to 
correct the error and to reprove the evil; but let us make 
them see that 

" Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears, 
Our faith, triumphant o'er our fears " 

are all with that better self whose fruits in their life and 
conduct are filling our hearts with happiness. 

All that has been said about parents applies almost as 
closely to teachers. Many of them, I am sure, understand 
it perfectly. To Sunday school teachers, especially, it 
offers a most practical suggestion. And I do not know of 
any association of human beings in which it would not be 

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BLESSING AND BANNING 

found to be the right attitude of mind. No matter with 
whom we may be keeping company the right relation to 
them, the Christly relation, is to be looking out for the good 
in them and to be glad when we find it. If we were living 
in a penitentiary or a workhouse, that I am sure would be 
the right attitude toward the inmates — to be vigilant to 
discern and commend all signs of good in their characters. 
If Jesus were here, we may be sure that he would get 
acquainted with the people in the Pen and in the Work- 
house; and we can see him, who needed not that any should 
testify to him of man, because he knew what was in man, 
going about among these hapless people, and finding a 
word of blessing for every one of them. 

" You, poor fellow, are often ashamed and sorry for what 
you have been and done, your very shame and sorrow is a 
sign that God is with you, and the blessing of the poor in 
spirit belongs to you." 

" And you are heavy-hearted because bad news has come 
to you from home; the God of all comfort is your friend." 

" And you have been trying to fight down your resent- 
ful feeling; the blessing of the meek is yours." 

" And you have been thinking that if you could be right 
and sound and clean, that would be the greatest thing in the 
world; God bless you; you shall have it if you want it," — 
and so on and so on. 

Do we not know that he would find the better self in 
every one of them and breathe new life into it? Mr. 
Jerome's story and play, " The Passing of the Third Floor 

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THE INTERPRETER 

Back," — I have spoken of it before, but this is the place 
to speak of it again, — that mysterious personage who occu- 
pied the " Third Floor Back " was meant by the novelist 
to suggest none other than the author of the Beatitudes; 
and this was just his word to all those ugly, mean, cantanker- 
ous people — Blessed! He looked into the heart of every 
one of them and found something beautiful and good there 
and showed it to them, and that transformed their lives. 
The lesson of " The Servant in the House " is, of course, 
essentially the same. 

There is no association of human beings, I say, in which 
this spirit and habit of mind will not be found the sovereign 
remedy for friction, and the solution of strife. Where 
men and women are working together, in the store, in 
the shop, in the factory, the spirit that is watching for the 
good in others, and rejoicing to find it, is the spirit that 
creates and multiplies good, and thus produces peace and 
welfare and happiness. 

When human beings are mingling in the mill or in the 
mart, in the council chamber or in the state-house, those 
who are looking for evil in their associates will have no 
difficulty in finding it, and when they have found it, how 
little good it does them! If they would only learn of Jesus 
Christ to look for the good they would find that, and how 
much better it would be for them and all the rest of us! 
If the spirit of blessing instead of the spirit of banning 
could take possession of our lives, so that we should be 
prompted to watch for the good that we might rejoice in 

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BLESSING AND BANNING 

it and praise it, what a different world this soon would be! 
And why not? Why not? Is there anything absurd or 
unphilosophical in such a suggestion? Is Christ's way of 
facing the world with a blessing instead of a ban the only 
irrational way, the only unpractical way? An apostle tells 
us that the right attitude before life is the rejoicing attitude. 
" Rejoice in the Lord alway, and again I say rejoice." 

But the normal life is spent among men; we are always 
in the presence of our fellows; and it is only by turning our 
thoughts away from the evil in their lives and fastening 
our faith on the good that is in them that we can keep in 
that rejoicing mood. The love that is the fulfilling of the 
law, Paul tells us, thinketh no evil and rejoiceth not in 
iniquity, but rejoiceth with the truth. That is its habitual 
attitude before life. 

Why is it that it has become the way of the world 
to reverse this attitude — and to assume — almost to 
assume — that every man is bad, until he has proven him- 
self to be good. Is it not due in large part to a pessimistic 
theology which assumed that human nature in its best 
estate was totally depraved, and taught us to look for the 
worst in our neighbors instead of the best? 

It is hard to unlearn that depressing philosophy, and to 
learn to look upon our neighbors in the light in which 
Jesus beheld them on the Mount of Beatitudes. But that 
is the lesson we have to learn, and the movement of the 
world out into the light and joy of the latter day waits on 
our learning it. 

249 



THE INTERPRETER 

Most profoundly is it to be wished that the Christian 
church could be brought together on that Mount of the 
Beatitudes to listen to the voice of its Master and to learn 
from him how to say " Blessed! " — to make his benedic- 
tion the burden of its message. Unhappily its tone has 
often been very different from this. It has been quite too 
much disposed to put the emphasis on banning the evil, 
rather than on blessing the good. This, perhaps, is largely 
due to that pessimistic theology in whose shadow, for so 
many centuries, it has been walking. Even in its evangel- 
istic work it has often put so much emphasis on the evil in 
human nature that it was hard to find much foothold for 
the good. 

I once heard an able and brilliant minister preach an 
installation sermon on the beautiful text: " Where sin 
abounded grace did abound more exceedingly," and he 
spent fully forty-five minutes in showing how tremendously 
and overwhelmingly sin abounded, and had but about five 
minutes left to tell about grace abounding; so that the 
whole effect of the sermon was exactly to contradict the 
text. But he was simply following the homiletical habit 
into which his studies had led him. 

The consequence is that the church, in its attitude before 
the community often seems to be in a minatory and for- 
bidding mood, assuming that its function is censorship 
rather than friendship; looking for things to reprove and 
correct more than for things to praise and promote. 

I have tried to make it plain that there is work of this 

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BLESSING AND BANNING 

kind to do, everywhere; and I am not proposing to muzzle 
the church in its testimony against social evils; but I do 
wonder whether in its administration of the gospel there 
has not been some loss of proportion here. Surely it must 
have something other and better to do than to forbid 
and condemn. It isn't all pruning and amputating 
and cauterizing; there is planting and watering and 
cultivating and fertilizing and nursing to do. 

Lam afraid that there are a great many Christians who 
think that Christianity, and in fact virtue, consists mainly, 
if hot wholly, in being against something or other; that a 
church's efficiency can be estimated only by counting the 
number of things it is opposed to. It is all wrong; it is 
time that we were shown a more excellent way — the way 
of love, the way of affirmation and appreciation, the way of 
helpfulness. The church has expended most of its energies 
in works of reform; how needful it is that she should learn 
the wisdom of Horace Mann's maxim, that formation is 
infinitely better than reformation. We have been warring 
for a century against intemperance; I wonder if it would be 
possible for the church to understand that a better thing to 
do would be to promote temperance. 

I suspect that that sentence would convey to a great 
many people no meaning at all. Yet I am sure that it 
does mean a great deal; and that the positive and con- 
structive ways of dealing with this problem are the ways 
that the church must learn. Jesus said that merely to 
pull up tares is worse than useless; you root up the wheat 

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THE INTERPRETER 

with them. Merely to cast out devils is poor policy; 
" when the unclean spirit goeth out of a man he walketh 
through dry places seeking rest, and finding none, he saith, 
I will return unto my house whence I came out. And 
when he cometh he findeth it swept and garnished. Then 
goeth he and taketh to him seven other spirits more wicked 
than himself, and they enter in and dwell there, and the 
last state of that man is worse than the first." The church 
whose strength is spent in waging warfare on social evil is 
doing a losing business. She ought to be putting something 
better in its place. 

In these Lenten days we are trying to clarify our ideas 
of what religion is, and how to strengthen its hold on our 
own lives and on the life of the church. Two weeks ago 
we found that the way to begin the religious life is to get 
better acquainted with our own better selves; since it is in 
our own better selves that God holds fellowship with us. 
Today we have seen that it is by getting acquainted with all 
that is best in other people, and cultivating that, that we 
do our best work in the world. 

I hope that as a church we have some understanding of 
this principle and are disposed to build our life on it. We 
want this church to be a power for good in this community, 
and therefore we want it to keep itself in constant and vital 
contact with all that is best in the life of the community; 
to be in the closest sympathy with all who are working to 
make it a better community. We want to gather into it the 
people who believe in God and in men; who believe that 

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BLESSING AND BANNING 

there is something godlike in all men, and who mean to 
keep their eyes open for that, and to rejoice in it; and we 
are sure that such a company of people can do much to 
bring the Kingdom for which we pray. 

fellow men, there is a great deal that is good in this 
world of ours, and the main business of every one of us is 
to get in touch with it, and fall in love with it, and fill our 
souls with the joy of it, and pour out our lives in the service 
of it. " Nearer, my God, to Thee," we often pray; but 
are there any ways in which we can get nearer to him than 
by communing with all that is best in our own thoughts 
and wishes and by fellowship with the best that we can 
find in the lives of our fellow men? If God is in his world, 
that is where we shall find him, for he is not the God of the 
dead but the God of the living. And when we find him 
there and enter into fellowship with him there, we shall 
find in our own hearts the spirit that is slow to ban and 
swift to bless. 



253 



XV 
THE CALL OF THE KINGDOM 



XV 
THE CALL OF THE KINGDOM 

The subject on which I find myself announced to speak 
is " The Range of the Social Demand of the Gospel." The 
phrase seems to assume that the Gospel makes a social 
demand, and it implies that this demand has a wide range. 
What is this Gospel? The first mention of it in Matthew 
describes it as the gospel of the Kingdom, and states that 
Jesus was going about in all Galilee, " teaching in their 
synagogues and preaching the Gospel of the King- 
dom." It was evidently the burden of all his teaching and 
preaching. 

One of his first general orders is the comprehensive 
injunction: " Seek first his Kingdom " — the Kingdom of 
God — " and his righteousness; and all these things " — 
all the things that are really needful, " shall be added unto 
you." 

What does this mean? I remember a day when it had 
no other meaning for me than to seek to secure my individual 
salvation from sin and death. I had a " never dying soul 
to save and fit it for the sky." To do that was to seek first 
the Kingdom of God. If any one had spoken about the 
social demands of the gospel I should not have known what 
he meant. 

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THE INTERPRETER 

Later there came a day when to seek first the Kingdom of 
God meant to make it my first business not only to secure 
my own salvation, but to promote in every possible way 
the growth of the local church of which I was a member. 
The range of the social demand of the Gospel was thus 
widening. 

Later still the phrase began to include the increase of the 
membership and influence of the denomination to which I 
belonged, and still later the growth of all the organizations 
and agencies by which the church expresses its life. 

It was a good while before I began to comprehend that 
this was not the whole of Christianity — not the whole of 
religion; that all this might be done and the great com- 
mand of the Master remain undone; that the Kingdom of 
God was something bigger, broader, wider, deeper, higher, 
diviner than all the ecclesiasticisms. I have never wished 
to leave out of this injunction any of the things that my 
earlier thought included in it; but I have lived to see that 
the Kingdom of heaven comprehends them all, and a great 
deal more; that to seek first the Kingdom of God means 
not only to promote the interests which are recognized and 
labelled as religious interests, but all human interests. 
In fact, Christianity may truly say of itself what the old 
Roman said: " Nothing human is alien to me." The 
range of the social demand of the Gospel is as wide as 
the needs of humanity. 

This is the truth which is meant to be expressed in this 
department of the work of this Council. It recognizes 

258 



THE CALL OF THE KINGDOM 

the fact that the Kingdom includes the church, — that the 
church is a vital and essential part of the Kingdom; but 
it insists that the Kingdom is a great deal bigger thing than 
the church, and that the righteousness of the Kingdom is a 
larger kind of righteousness than the righteousness of the 
church. 

What, then, besides the church, and the institutions and 
interests technically described as religious, does the King- 
dom of heaven include? We may assume that it includes 
the universe; but we will not speculate on the religion 
or the politics of the other spheres. It is not the cosmos but 
the community with which we are now concerned. Con- 
sidering yourselves as members of the civic community, 
the town or the city which is your home, what does the 
Kingdom of God, which you are to seek first, include? 

It includes the government of your city or your town — 
all the civic organizations and agencies for the preservation 
of the peace and the promotion of public welfare that have 
their headquarters in the city hall. This is just as much a 
part of the Kingdom of God as the church is; it is just as 
dear to God as the church is; its functions are just as relig- 
ious as the functions of the church. You are not a Chris- 
tian if you do not cherish the civic institutions of your city 
with a passion as fervent and holy as that with which you 
cherish the life of your church. 

" If I forget thee O Jerusalem, 
Let my right hand forget her cunning; 
Let my tongue cleave unto the roof of my mouth; 

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THE INTERPRETER 

If I remember thee not, 
If I prefer not Jerusalem 
Above my chief joy." 

That was the way the old Psalmist felt about his city. 
Did you ever feel like that about Columbus or Los Angeles 
or Boston? God forgive you if you have not more than 
once! Your city is as dear to God as Jerusalem ever 
was, and it ought to be as dear to you as Jerusalem was 
to a Jew. 

The Kingdom includes schools of all grades, all the educa- 
tional agencies of the community. Can you imagine that 
these institutions, in which minds are disciplined, characters 
are built, souls are trained, have no part in the plan by which 
God is carrying on his work in your city? I am sure that 
any wise man who was seeking for the Kingdom of God in 
Los Angeles or Boston, would go, first of all, to the school- 
houses, and that any one who wanted to help in building 
the kingdom would feel that here was an agency with which 
he must closely ally himself. 

The Kingdom includes the whole world of art. The 
ministry of beauty, in all its forms, is divinely ordained. 
He who hath made everything beautiful in its season is 
always at work, on the same lines. Beauty is one of his 
attributes, as well as goodness and truth; and he is always 
inspiring men to show it forth. This sacred thing, like 
every other sacred thing, can be profaned; but its essential 
nature cannot be hidden. And the kingdom of God which 
you pray for will not have fully come until your city is filled 

260 



THE CALL OF THE KINGDOM 

with beauty, until devout men are singing in your streets, 
"Beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth is Min- 
neapolis," or Detroit or Cleveland — wherever your home 
may be. 

The Kingdom includes the ministry of joy. The realm 
of play belongs to it; it is as divine, within its normal 
limitations, as any other part of life. Don't you suppose 
that there will be playgrounds in heaven? Surely, surely! 
No man or woman of this generation who ever was a child 
could conceive of a heaven without playgrounds. Did 
you ever tell your children so? O tell them, tell them! 

Nobody ever told me such a thing when I was a child. 
Nobody, I think, would have dared to mention such a 
thing then. 

Well do I remember, when I was not more than six years 
old, thinking it all over. I liked to sing, and the only place 
I had heard of, where I wanted to be in heaven, was in the 
singers' seats; and I thought that I should like to sit there 
and sing for — oh, for — may be — about sixty years ; 
but that was the limit; I feared that I should be tired of 
singing by that time and should want to go out and play, 
and where could I go? The only place outside of heaven 
that I had heard of was a place without playgrounds. 
Playgrounds in heaven? Heaven forbid! I could not 
have dreamed of a thing so impious! Tell your children 
that there will be playgrounds in heaven, and when you 
pray that the Kingdom of heaven may come to your city, 
never forget to include that in your petition. 

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THE INTERPRETER 

The Kingdom includes, of course, all the philanthropies, 
all the institutions and agencies of compassion, all the ex- 
pressions of pity and sympathy, all the ministries of human 
kindness. When you pray for the coming of the Kingdom, 
you desire, of course, that the sum of suffering and misery 
may be reduced; and believe that it will be; but inasmuch 
as poverty and pain and sorrow are likely to be with us for 
a good while yet, the Kingdom of heaven must make room 
for all those services of love by which burdens are lifted 
and wounds are assuaged and hearts are comforted. A 
great city in these days is full of this beneficent work, 
much of it under the care of the churches, much of it out- 
side of them, but all of it a bright and blessed sign of the 
presence of the Kingdom. 

The Kingdom includes the whole realm of industry and 
trade — the farms, the ranches, the factories, the mills, 
the furnaces, the banks, the stores, the organizations of 
finance and traffic and labor; they are as much a part of 
the Kingdom of God as the churches and the Sunday 
schools. What kind of a Kingdom of God would it be that 
left all this mighty economic realm outside? The fact that 
Mammon claims it, and disfigures and defiles it, and that 
much of it submits to his sway, does not make it his; he 
is a usurper; it all belongs to God; it is all under spiritual 
law; and the first business of the church is to assert his 
claim over it all and to proclaim and enforce his law. A 
very large part of what is meant by seeking first the King- 
dom of God and his righteousness is seeking to bring this 

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THE CALL OF THE KINGDOM 

whole realm of business and finance and labor under the 
law of the Kingdom, which is the law of good will. 

Finally, for I cannot extend this analysis, the Kingdom 
we seek includes not only all the industrial and social 
and civic organizations and institutions, and groups and 
interests which I have mentioned, it includes all the people, 
young and old, rich and poor, good and bad, black and 
white, native-born and foreign-born, all the people of the 
city. They are all included under the benign sway of the 
King of love; how could any one be counted out? His 
authority is over all, his providence embraces all, his 
fatherly love yearns over all, his law of good will is binding 
upon all. Many disobey it, but they are all subject to it 
and the penalty of disobedience is always enforced; no 
one ever disobeys it without being made worse by his 
disobedience. It is the law, the law of the life of this 
community; obeyed, it brings order and health and pros- 
perity and happiness; disobeyed, it brings confusion and 
weakness and want and misery; it is the law of this com- 
munity, and of every community under the sun, was in 
the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without 
end, Amen. When we pray that this Kingdom may come, 
we do not, if we are intelligent, imply that this law is not 
in force; we pray that it may be recognized as the law; that 
it may have its rightful supremacy over human thoughts 
and wills. 

For the Christians of your town or city to seek first the 
Kingdom of God would be, then, to wish and pray and work 

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THE INTERPRETER 

that the government of your city may be conformed to 
the law of the Kingdom; that the schools and colleges may 
lead the youth into the way of the Kingdom ; that your art 
may be inspired by a vision of the Kingdom; that your 
play may reflect the joy of the Kingdom; that your chari- 
ties may reveal the compassion of the Kingdom; that your 
business may illustrate the cooperations of the Kingdom; 
that your people may live in the life of the Kingdom. 

We are talking about federating the churches of our towns 
and cities. This, if I understand the matter, is substan- 
tially what the federation of your churches means. They 
have heard the call of the Kingdom, and are rallying in 
response to that call. They have caught the vision of a 
community bound together by the bonds of brotherhood, 
ruled by the law of friendship, creating and sharing a 
common good. They believe that every city can be and 
ought to be a holy city, a city of God. 

If the churches of your city can only seize this great hope 
and hold it aloft, and have their hearts kindled by it, and 
pour their energies into the realization of it, is it not credible 
that the days of dearth and solicitude of which you now 
complain would soon be past; that the sluggish tides of 
church life would be replenished, and that the multitudes 
now alienated would come thronging back into their gates? 
Can you imagine that churches on fire with the passion of 
the Kingdom would be complaining of waning influence or 
shrinking membership rolls? 

Do you say that this hope of a community of good will 

264 



THE CALL OF THE KINGDOM 

is a visionary conception — something far in the future? 
Well, it is just as far away as our faith puts it, and just as 
near at hand as our faith brings it. It would be here to- 
morrow if the churches of your city believed in it. And I 
want to tell you that there are a good many people in this 
country today, outside the churches, who are beginning to 
believe in it. Listen to these words : 

There is one way of dealing with the social problems — 
" the way of the loving, gentle, great prophet of Nazareth. 
We have tried every way but that, we have sampled every 
other social philosophy but His, and haven't rung many 
bull's eyes yet. 

" His philosophy was the only one that ever did succeed, 
and, do you know, it wouldn't surprise me a bit some day 
to see the good old United States quit all its conceited and 
fiddling experiments with vice and crime and acknowledge 
that it's the only one that ever will." 

Do you recognize the voice? Well, it is the voice, barring 
the brogue, of Mr. Dooley. He is not, as you are aware, a 
sentimentalist, but he is a philosopher, with a vision as clear 
as any of his guild. 

Is it really true that the Church of Jesus Christ thinks 
that God's Kingdom cannot come, and that his will cannot 
be done in earth as it is in heaven? Let me tell you some- 
thing. There are a good many Socialists who think that 
it can. A good many of them have a tremendous faith in 
the coming to pass of the very thing that we have been 
looking at — essentially, the very thing. 

265 



THE INTERPRETER 

Most of them think that it can be brought in by economic 
or political machinery. That is their error. They think 
that they can build economic socialism on moral individual- 
ism. It never can be done. There is a more excellent 
way, and they will never prosper till they find it. But 
they are not wrong in thinking that the Kingdom of heaven 
is at hand. And for Socialists who see the Kingdom, and 
are seeking it with all their hearts, even by inadequate 
methods, there is more hope than for Christians who do not 
see it and have no heart to seek it. 

Does any one protest against substituting sociology for 
religion? Nay, this is nothing of the sort. Let us not use 
words to confuse thought. Is seeking first the Kingdom 
of God and his righteousness sociology? If it is, it is a 
kind of sociology of which no disciple of Jesus ought to be 
afraid. 

" We do not want," says Walter Rauschenbusch, " to 
substitute social activities for religion. If the church 
comes to substitute social activities and doings, because 
its religion has become paralytic, may God have mercy on 
us all! We do not want less religion; we want more; but 
it must be a religion that gets its orientation from the 
Kingdom of God. To concentrate our efforts on personal 
salvation, as orthodoxy has done, or on soul culture, as 
liberalism has done, comes close to refined selfishness. All 
of us who have been trained in egoistic religion need a 
conversion to Christian Christianity, even if we are bishops 
or theological professors. Seek ye first the Kingdom of 

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THE CALL OF THE KINGDOM 

God and God's righteousness, and the salvation of your 
souls will be added unto you. ... A religion which realizes 
in God the bond that binds all men together, can create 
the men who will knit the social order together as an organ- 
ized brotherhood." 

If the churches of your city, gathered in a federation, 
could but get the vision of this divine possibility, and with 
one heart and one soul could throw their energies and their 
resources into the realization of it, no one can tell what the 
issue might be. With such a work on its hands and such a 
fire in its heart, the church would get attention to its mes- 
sage; the carping voices would be silenced; the chasm 
which divides the working classes from the church would 
shrink to a fissure; men would cease to think of God as 
careless or unkind; the Brotherhood, when we realize it, 
will prove the Fatherhood. 

A light like this could not be hid. If the churches of 
one city began to seek first the Kingdom of God, the story 
would spread; glorious things would be spoken of that city; 
other cities would be caught by the flame ; for this is a good 
that cannot be monopolized; you could no more stop it 
once it was started than you could stop a prairie fire; 
and the area of good will would soon be nation-wide. 

And it is coming. It must come. There is no other way 
for the children of men to live together. This dreadful 
war is the expiring spasm of the individualism which cul- 
minates in militarism and nationalism, and threatens the 
extinction of the race. God has something better for the 

267 



THE INTERPRETER 

world than this. This is the time to believe it. If we ever 
doubt it, may God forgive our faithlessness! Lift up your 
hearts, beloved! It is nigh, even at the doors! 

" beautiful for patriot's dream, 

That sees beyond the years 
Thine alabaster cities gleam 

Undimmed by human tears, — 
America! America! 

God shed his grace on thee, 
And crown thy good with brotherhood 

From sea to shining sea!" 






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